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I have a mediabox with eight CAT6A jacks (at least CAT6A is imprinted on them) preinstalled. The ethernet cables (orange) lead to different rooms in the appartment.

The "FRITZ!BOX/Homebox Cable" router has only four RJ45 jacks. My goal is to gather all the CAT6A jacks in a single local area network (also enabling WAN via the router ofcourse), using a NETGEAR ProSAFE GS108Ev3 switch.

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I bought CAT7 gigabit ethernet cables with RJ45 plugs (S/FTP PIMF), which should be downwards compatible with CAT6A, CAT6, CAT5E etcetera.

However, if I connect the FRITZ!BOX LAN1 port with one of the ProSAFE switch's ports (in this case port1), and then connect the switch with one of the CAT6A ports and furthermore connect my laptop's RJ45 with the RJ45 outlet in the room the CAT6A is leading to it says "unidentified network / no internet connection". What I have noticed is that the switch's port that connects to the CAT6A jack is always indicating the LED that says "10M connection active", even if there is no client connected anywhere. I am not sure if thats normal.

Here is a topology draft for better understanding:

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Using this setup, I can neither ping/reach the router (192.168.178.1) nor the switch (192.168.178.2) from the laptop that is in whatever room the orange cable leads to (I have tried different outlets in different rooms).

Even though CAT6+ is harder to break than earlier versions I have noticed that the cables are bent really hard, like you can see in this picture:

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I have had broken cables before but the ones in the picture aren't bent as badly as the cables that stopped working properly after being bent too much. Could it be physical failure?

When I connect the router to the switch with CAT7/RJ45, and then connect my laptop directly to the switch using the same type of cable I get a 1Gbit uplink (IP via DHCP) and I am able to surf the web and ping the switch/router or visit the webinterfaces of these two devices.

Furthermore I can see my laptop appearing in the router webinterface's network connection tab like so:

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The general settings for the NETGEAR ProSAFE switch look like this:

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And the port status tab shows that everything is normal as soon as I bypass the CAT6A jacks with the orange cables (I'm not sure if its really CAT6A cables, I can not read the imprints):

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Did the electrician do a sloppy job or am I using the wrong hardware? How do I connect the four rooms (with a dual outlet of RJ45 each) via the CAT6A jacks in the mediabox?

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    Start with the physical layer and use a cable tester or toner to test the jacks to the patch panel.
    – joeqwerty
    May 7, 2018 at 21:54
  • I couldn't get my hands on a tester yet, I am trying to get a hold of one. Though, the electricians report said he tested all cables and all showed connectivity. I've tried to connect to all of them, none worked. Hard to believe all have physical damage without a single packet getting through. Maybe he did not connect them to the RJ45 jacks properly (wrong pin pattern), this would have made his tester show connection but the laptop fail to read the ARP packets properly, wouldn't it?
    – phew
    May 7, 2018 at 22:28
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    Definitely something is wrong with the cabling or how it is wired to the jacks. You’ll need to test and/or physically inspect the punch down order on the jacks. May 8, 2018 at 3:10

1 Answer 1

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It's quite likely the person who installed your in-wall wiring connected the wrong conductors to the wrong pins. One tricky thing with Ethernet is that which pins are part of a twisted pair matters, and the pairing isn't straightforward. It's 1&2, 3&6, 4&5, 7&8.

Please note that a typical cheap Ethernet cable tester is basically a fancy continuity/pinout tester and can't tell which pins are connected to which pairs.

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    Another electrician of the same company came today and checked all the jacks. The ones his trainee made were all wired incorrectly. Plus all cables had a bend radius of 45° to 110° whereas the internet told me for ethernet cables its 30° maximum. The result was three incorrectly connected jacks and two broken cables. The guy who came today seemed to know what he's doing and just connected all jacks for a new and shortened the cables where they were bent too much. Now I get the full 1Gbit/s on all 8 jacks throughout the house! Cheers for the help.
    – phew
    May 9, 2018 at 15:19

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