Thanks for the info, I'll probably pick it up.:smiley:

I have just checked my local Poundland store (Corby, Northants) and unsurprisingly it has sold out of the 10m cables, but still has a few of the 3m cables. I noticed in the Poundworld store next doood that they had (unbranded) 5m patch cables.

I know, I need to get out more.

Cool banana, I'd never have guessed that!

Think its Power over Ethernet.

Ah: Pile of Excrement, obviously!

I was going to say "if you don't know what that means then spend 10 seconds looking it up on Google rather than bothering everyone reading this thread" but I thought "no, people know how to use the internet nowadays".

Just don't try to use with anything PoE - these will be nasty high resistance CCA cables.

The crossover works fine as a patch cable.

The easiest way to confirm was to plug the 10m cable I bought in Poundland the other day to my laptop and the router, and see if it works, and the answer is: yes, of course it does. The laptop picked up the connection straight away, I turned off its WiFi and you are reading this.
QED.
Alan

Haha yeah many things in Maplin are way too overpriced. :stuck_out_tongue:
But honestly I don't know what a T568A or whatever is, sorry for my ignorance.
In simple terms, is it something I can take out of the box and connect
it between my laptop and router or will there be hassle involved? (I'm talking about the crossover cables.)

Neither in stock at two stores in my town.

Isn't that affected by crosstalk? The pairs are twisted together to cancel out electromagnetic interference and reduce/eliminate crosstalk. Very sceptical about that being CAT6 (or even CAT5) without the twisted pairs, CAT6 even includes measures to keep the pairs twisted as far into the connector as possible.


It's a cable (or two sockets if you want a converter) with one end wired to T568A and the other T568B, rather than the same at both ends (usually T568B at both ends, though T568A on both works too). It's just something we used to have to use in the old days to connect two devices together without a switch, these days they auto detect.

As mentioned above, it might be possible to use a crossover cable and it will auto detect and work, I've never tried it because I have easy access to as many patch cables as I need and haven't used a crossover in years.

Get it anyway, you won't get a 10m cable for £1 anywhere else instore without delivery costs. If it doesn't work there's crossover adaptors on ebay for <£1.50. Otherwise, somewhere like Comms Express will give you a decent price, you'll have to pay shipping but can get any length you need, don't buy stuff like this from Maplin, it's a similar experience to being mugged, only you'll be hassled to take a catalogue and give them your address in the process.

Certainly true in my experience. I've gone from connecting 2 computers directly via Ethernet using a cross over cable to using a mixture of old cross-over and non cross-over cables and all work fine as modern switches and routers and indeed NICs detect cross-over cables automatically and work fine. I even get 1Gb/s without any problems using my 13 year old CAT5e cross over cable as part of the network at home.

a crossover cable is for connecting two computers directly without a hub or switch in the middle.

At £1 these are decent value, but really? A Network cable costing a Tenner? These things are dirt cheap. Anyone spending more than a couple of quid on a RJ45 cable is being ripped off good and proper.

Don't buy these long Belkin cables - they are tightly wound and you'll never get the kinks out !

Yes, whilst crossover cables were for connecting 2 computers, I think everything will have Auto MDI (that name may not be exactly right - my memory!) and so will pick up that it is a crossover rather than straight through RJ45 and configure itself accordingly. If I get time on Monday I'll try it out to see if my theory is correct.

Everything domestic should auto-detect and hence although a crossover cable is not orthodox it should work fine I think. See here.

Thanks.
What's a crossover cable? And why would I most likely not want it?
I need more than 2m.
Probably at least 3m or 4m. :smiley:

Excellent, I hope I can find one. (10m sounds good to me.....hopefully the length doesn't affect the data transfer rate much.)
The ethernet cable supplied in my Sky router box was of a stupidly short length.

Unfortunately these things won't fix the big problem with my
rubbish Sky internet.....it drops fairly frequently whether via ethernet or wifi.
Struggling to find a cheaper ISP though.

Hah, I know there is a wonky veg box you can get but that pepper looks like it is going into the fetal position!

Oh good. Hope they are back in my local. Need some.

Both Cat5e.

It's cat5e or cat6?

Gotta be good, whilst I'd avoid Belkin as they're usually way over priced, at a £1 they're exceptional value as they are usually well constructed cables and connectors.