cat5 cables...whereto buy?

[fluxquantum]

where can i buy some online? also does brand matter or is it irrelevant? thanks in advance. 🙂

 

[bagaki]

i dont know how much you want, but this deal is too good to be true. If i were you i would buy this, use what you need. then tell people for like 5 or 10 bucks that you can make them cables. you can sell it much much cheaper than they could get it in the store, and selling enought to make your money back would be a piece of cake

EDIT: i am sorry, but after i posted this, i was going to order it myself and i noticed it is out of stock. Either way, shop around and just buy it in bulk. 1000ft is a lot, but you could sell a few hundred feet to friends and the like, and still make your money back. As for places to get it, i dont know of any off the top of my head, but try some name-brand stores that would carry such an item and see what their prices are.

this is what i found on a google search - you can use it as a starting point for price shopping: link

bagaki

 

[Spac3d]

MicroCenter has a sale right now, 50 feet for $4.79 ... its Belkin too! 🙂

I picked up 2 of them, they have smaller sizes, I think the 25 foot one is $3.79 and the 14ft is $2.89

Spac3d

 

[JEFF68005]

Simply stop in at TARGET / Best Buy / Radio Shack , etc and you can have it today. It's not that hard to come by. I picked one up for a PC that I am building at Target just yesterday (when there for other things) for under $7.00. It wasn't worth the gas or the value of my time to try to save a few bucks.

But if you like, PriceWatch lists them for $2.00 shipped.

Select OTHER / CABLES / CAT5. or if you need longer you can select CAT5 50FTCAT5 100FTr CAT5 1000FT

 

[Utterman]

The problem with Bestbuy and Target is that they markup the price of the cables. Charging something like 30 bucks for 50ft. of cable!!:Q

For that price, I could get almost 200 ft of cable from home depot at 14 cents a foot.

 

[dszd0g]

If you want a short single cable just buy the cheapest decent brand CAT5 Cable you can find (Belkin isn't a bad brand cable and can generally be found pretty cheap).

If you are wiring an office or home and you want a ton of cable, I would buy a 1000" roll, connectors, a crimper, and a cable tester. If you are wiring your home, I would check the difference in price between CAT5 and CAT5e as it may be worth going CAT5e in the long term.

One can make cables that will work fairly easily (with a little bit of practice and good connectors and a good crimper make all the difference). Making cables that will successfully operate to the CAT5 specification and pass a commercial CAT5 cable tester is much more difficult. One has to read the CAT5 specification and follow all their guidelines about how much of the cable can be stripped on each end (too much stripped adds noise and won't be as fast of a cable), how much of each wire needs to make a connection with each pin, and how to choose cable lengths. I would not buy a cable from someone who did not know and practice these things.

 

[dszd0g]

As an aside, when I used to make cables for servers I used to benchmark the cables I made with AnySpeed to make sure I gave my servers a good cable. A good crimp vs. a bad crimp can make over 15Mb/s difference in actual data transfers.

People who say that it is easy to make CAT5 cables are kind of our a joke to me, sure it is easy to make cables that work. But making fast cables is a pain.

 

[fluxquantum]

thanks for the response guys.

 

[cmdrdredd]

I'm not sure who makes them, but there are some at radioshack that have yellow casing and blue ends that work REALLY well on my 100base-T network...I max out at around 85% the total bandwidth available between 2 computers when transfering my 5GB video files.

 

[dbrown39]

The big question is are you connecting two computers with or without a rotter. If it's without make sure it's a crossover cable which are harder to find. I had the company I worked for IT group make me a 50FT crossover for free.🙂

DB