Flat network cable for rj45?

GrimReaper

Can anyone point me to some flat network cabling? (In the UK)

I'm currently trying to find some (roughly in the region of 20 meters) and for the life of me I can't find any crimped or un-crimped.

This is for my house, the way I currently have it is that the router is on a floor above the actual telephone connection. It's connected via a normal telephone extension cable, from what I can ascertain that's degrading the signal somewhat so I'm not getting as good of a connection as I can.

Now, the router does have wireless capabilities but for gaming that's unacceptable. So what I intend to do is connect the router direct to the phone connection in the room downstairs and use some flat network cabling all the way upstairs to a switch which then leads to my PC, PS3 and 360.

Currently been looking on the maplins site and I can't find any for the life of me. (popping into town tomorrow so i'm intending to go to maplins)

wunderbar

the only flat cable I have ever seen is a rollover cable that is used for connecting to a switch via a console command line. I have never even heard of flat ethernet cable because the way Ethernet is cable is built in twisted pairs for a reason, to limit interference.

GrimReaper

wunderbar wrote: »

the only flat cable I have ever seen is a rollover cable that is used for connecting to a switch via a console command line. I have never even heard of flat ethernet cable because the way Ethernet is cable is built in twisted pairs for a reason, to limit interference.

I know, hence me not asking for CAT5 since that's twisted pairs. But the stuff exists. It's not as if it's over 90 meters or in a pipe with lots of other cables.

bowen

Most likely what you had was CAT3 which is untwisted. At least that's what we used when we needed flat cables. Be aware that you only can go about 50-100 feet with flat ones.

Edit: Nevermind, I double checked, we had CAT5 UTP cables. Double edit, doesn't matter about the UTP, seems there's no standard to determine if they're flat (it's supposedly untwisted though, I cut one open to see and they are untwisted).

Super Edit:

Is 100 ft good?

Quintuple Edit:

At the bottom of the link you specified, there's the ability to order a $100 250 ft spool of bulk, flat CAT5, I'd suggest that if you don't want the ultra-fancy see-through CAT5.

GrimReaper

Problem with those though is that they're in north America. I'm in the UK here. I'm mulling things over quite a bit, i've been tweaking the gain on the ADSL to try and eek out the best possible signal. So far i've connected it directly and via the normal extension and the best speed i've gotten is 350KB/sec. (both with and without, so it looks like the connected directly route may not be used)

With my previous provider I could get 450KB/sec. I think when I switched somebody has messed up at the exchange. For example, the reported down speed and the actual down speed are often way out.

SiliconStew

Unless you have severe interference issues, wireless works perfectly well for gaming and everything else. I don't know why people seem to think it doesn't.

ginguskahn

Couple of things...

Is the flat cable just for neatness? Could you not run some normal cable and put up some pvc trunking to hide it?

With regards to the ADSL, if your trying to get every possible db out of that line there are a few things you could try, if your using the modem cable that came with the router, try replacing it with one made out of cat5 instead of telephone cable, and as short as possible obviously.

Secondly inside the telephone socket (your plugged directly into the master socket I presume) you can take out the ringer cables (most modern phones and dect phones, as well as micro filters have there own ringing circuit, so its not needed) which as I recall are the orange cables inside the wall box, and that should give you a much better signal (the ringer circuit acts like a big aerial with loads of interference) it made a decent difference on my router (I used to get about 8-9mb download, now i get 10-11).

Alistair Hutton

SiliconStew wrote: »

Unless you have severe interference issues, wireless works perfectly well for gaming and everything else. I don't know why people seem to think it doesn't.

Depends on the router. My Wireless Router (admittedly an Edimax) adds about 80ms to the connection over plugging in the computer by Cat-5 to the same router.

That's enough to screw me as a sniper.

Dixon

I've only just recenently switched over to wireless here, and I haven't had any problems but yeah the router would make a huge difference. My pc is running N standard and it works well

exoplasm

Secondly inside the telephone socket (your plugged directly into the master socket I presume) you can take out the ringer cables (most modern phones and dect phones, as well as micro filters have there own ringing circuit, so its not needed) which as I recall are the orange cables inside the wall box, and that should give you a much better signal (the ringer circuit acts like a big aerial with loads of interference) it made a decent difference on my router (I used to get about 8-9mb download, now i get 10-11).

I was about to call BS on this, but then common sense stopped me and I realized you guys are in the UK so it's a bit different. If anyone in the US tried to follow this advice they would probably just mess up their phone lines altogether.

PeregrineFalcon

GrimReaper wrote: »

Problem with those though is that they're in north America. I'm in the UK here. I'm mulling things over quite a bit, i've been tweaking the gain on the ADSL to try and eek out the best possible signal. So far i've connected it directly and via the normal extension and the best speed i've gotten is 350KB/sec. (both with and without, so it looks like the connected directly route may not be used)

With my previous provider I could get 450KB/sec. I think when I switched somebody has messed up at the exchange. For example, the reported down speed and the actual down speed are often way out.

Have you called your provider to make sure you didn't get dropped down in sync rate? Some of them have different distance standards to qualify.

Just make sure they don't put you on an interleaved link.

GrimReaper

This is the thread that wouldn't die, somebody should take a lead pipe to it and beat its skull in already.

Anyway, some of my connection problems have been caused by BT. They have this little annoying thing called "IP Profile" what this means is that if you connect at a certain speed below an expected speed then their system will automatically drop the entire line speed to a slower speed for a few days..

So, say you connect back at your nice 5.5mbps speed you'll still continue to get your crappy half speed for a few days until their system picks up on this and ups the ip profile back to full speed.

My Draytek Vigor 2800 seems to be really flaky with this line, so I connected up my older 2600 and it's rock solid. I'm just waiting for the damn stupid ip profile to go back to full speed now. I'm still tempted to connect it direct up to the phone socket though to see if I can get the line more stable to inch out a bit more speed.

Zilla360

Sounds like you need one of those microfilters that fits directly onto the master socket. If that doesn't improve speeds then you can only blame the copper from your exchange to your home.

Edit: Also invest in some high-quality shielded rj11.

ginguskahn

GrimReaper wrote: »

This is the thread that wouldn't die, somebody should take a lead pipe to it and beat its skull in already.

Anyway, some of my connection problems have been caused by BT. They have this little annoying thing called "IP Profile" what this means is that if you connect at a certain speed below an expected speed then their system will automatically drop the entire line speed to a slower speed for a few days..

So, say you connect back at your nice 5.5mbps speed you'll still continue to get your crappy half speed for a few days until their system picks up on this and ups the ip profile back to full speed.

My Draytek Vigor 2800 seems to be really flaky with this line, so I connected up my older 2600 and it's rock solid. I'm just waiting for the damn stupid ip profile to go back to full speed now. I'm still tempted to connect it direct up to the phone socket though to see if I can get the line more stable to inch out a bit more speed.

Wow, that sounds really annoying. Have you upgraded your 2800s firmware? I have the same router and there was a new release about a week ago, although the change log says most of the stuff is for 3g fall back, it (so far) seems to have me connected solidly at a better speed...

Jimmy King

GrimReaper wrote: »

wunderbar wrote: »

the only flat cable I have ever seen is a rollover cable that is used for connecting to a switch via a console command line. I have never even heard of flat ethernet cable because the way Ethernet is cable is built in twisted pairs for a reason, to limit interference.

I know, hence me not asking for CAT5 since that's twisted pairs. But the stuff exists. It's not as if it's over 90 meters or in a pipe with lots of other cables.

You're clearly right that it exists, and I've seen it on occasion, too. I wanted to point one thing out to you, though. cat5e is also twisted pair, as is cat 3, and cat 6.

In most ethernet cabling the twisted pairs are then also twisted around each other. I'm going to guess that in these flat cables the twisted pairs are running parallel to each other with no twists.