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I have Cat5e cables run to outlets/jacks throughout my house. They all come into a centralized structured wiring panel and are terminated at a punch-down module.

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My goal is to enable private DHCP through all these jacks via a router so that I can just plug a computer's network cable to the wall and it will have Internet. I plan to have a router near the structured wiring panel and to remove the Cat5e cables from the punch-down module so that I can terminate them with an RJ45 connector and insert them directly into the Router.

I cannot seem to get the connections between the wall jacks and the routers to work so I wonder if I am arranging the colors of the wires correctly. So far I have tried both standards T-568A and T-568B and inserted the wire into the router with no luck. I have not crimped the end as I wanted to be able to try different color arrangements.

Should this work? What color arrangement should I use if I am connecting one end of the ethernet cable to a wall jack (female) and another directly to a router (male)?

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The standard is 568B for most structured wiring jobs and I recommend sticking with it. You should always punch down to a patch panel and not go into a router directly, it is bad practice to do so - use small patch cords between the router and the patch panel, it is much easier to change configurations in the future if you ever need to. You will need to crimp/punch down the ends for it to work at all - it is the crimping that actually connects the pins with the wires in the RJ45 plug. I HIGHLY recommend getting yourself a decent tester (one that will check for reversals as well as continuity). A good tester will save you hours of troubleshooting and re-crimping/punching when dealing with structured wiring, it is worth the investment.

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  • You are a life saver! For now, I am just going to go into the router as I do not understand the patch panel configuration (but I will research it for the future). Your point about needing to crimp the ends was the key! I suspected that might be the case.
    – YeahStu
    Sep 11, 2011 at 14:01
  • Also note that the wire used for punching down on patch panels and the wire used for patch leads are different: punch down wiring is single, solid core while patch lead wiring has multiple copper strands within each wire. If you crimp a connector onto solid core cable, the compression of the single core can make it brittle and liable to fracture - giving poor joints, or joints that fail or get noisy later on, leading to all sorts of signal fun. Punching down multi-stranded wires gives loose joints that can also fail or go bad over time so use the right cable for the right job.
    – Linker3000
    Sep 11, 2011 at 16:40
  • There exist RJ45 connectors designed for solid cable... see cablemonkey.co.uk/plugs-boots/… for a cat-6 example.
    – matt
    Nov 16, 2017 at 16:12

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