Can connectors slow down a network connection?

[lokiju]

My house is wired with cat5e and I cannot for the life of me get anything over 100mb/s out of it.

I wish I had some extra length so I could cut a piece and make a patch out of it and see what that does, but I don't.

It seems hard to believe that something like a RJ45 connector or wall jack would cause this, but maybe I'm wrong.

To give some more detail, here's exactly what my set up is.

In my living room I have a gig switch, from that I have a flat cat6 that runs under my carpet to the jack behind my couch. When I plug this flat cat6 into my laptop to test I'm getting gig. Then I plug that into the cat5e which is interfaced via a wall jack that came with the house. This runs to my garage where there's a junction box. When I plug it in from the cable in the garage in that box I only get 100mb/s.

The cable is 100% cat5e rated so now I'm wondering wtf is causing this. The only things I can think are the issue is either the connector on the wall jack, the RJ45 connector on the end that's in the junction box in the garage or some rating or noise issue with the cable somewhere between the living room and the garage.

I wish I could just use the cable that's in there now as a pull string and pull some new cat6 but the builders stapled the cable all along the way to the wall studs, so that's not an option.

Example of what I mean when I saw wall connector.

http://base1.googlehosted.com/base_...es/29/2944_300.jpg&size=20&dhm=9cd77936&hl=en

So any chance that a RJ45 wall connector could be to blame?

 

[ScottMac]

Connectors can certainly kill your speed. More often than not, improper termination is the culprit. If they are not in the proper pair order, if there's too much untwisted, if there's too sharp of a bend, if they're crushed, twisted, knotted, nicked, stretched, rolled-over-by-chairs, chewed-by-animals ...

All cable should be terminated according to EIA/TIA 568a or 568b guidelines. If you have connectors terminated with {pair}{pair}{pair}{pair}, that's wrong, and will operate poorly. The issue is that Ethernet & Fast Ethernet used pairs 2&3 (orange and green), pins 1&2, 3&6. If you map that out on paper, you'll see that {pair}{pair}{pair}{pair} causes pair 2 (pins 3 & 6) to communicate on two different pair. That means that the "pair" is not twisted (two conductors around each other) which means it will fail horribly at crosstalk and noise mitigation, both inbound and outbound.

The rules for Cat6 & 6a are even stricter, especially on how much of the pair can be untwisted; up to cat5e will tolerate 1/2" MAX (exposed and untwisted), CAT6 and above is 3/8", and does not permit hand-made jumpers (termination to a jack or panel only, jumpers should be machine made to maintain tolerances).

Bend radius is critical as well, pulling tension, and a small book of other guidelines all come into play for optimal performance. Failure to follow the guidelines will result in reduced performance of some degree.

 

[lokiju]

Thanks for the reply, I'm just going to cut the connectors off and redo them at this point an hope that helps.