I recently purchased a 50' cat5 utp cable for my lan at home. it worked fine for about 4 months until a couple of days ago when it started acting a bit funky. all of a sudden my box appeared to lose it's connection through my router so i checked everything to make sure it was not the router and determined that it was the cable. the weird part is this....it would accept connections on ports like 21 and you could telnet into and out of it (from inside the lan). but it would not connect to anything outside of my lan. i've never seen nor heard of anything like this before and i was wondering if anyone could think of any possible reasons of why this happened. also, i tried connected it directly to my cable modem instead of through the router and it would not renew nor release an ip address. i believe the one time i did it gave me an ip address that was class b which is strange because i am connected through a class a provider. i thought it might have been outside electrical interference but i tested the cable in many different occasions and received the same results. i also inspected for breaks in the cable and found none. so i have no idea how/why something like this happens. should i go with STP?