my networking cable.

[alexXx]

When my dad built our house a few years ago, he acquired this beefy network cable from some place that i do not know. It is grey and it has more shielding inside than normal cat5 cable. It infact has too much sheilding for it to fit into an rj45 connector. We dont use it for patch cables so that isnt a problem. My question is, what is it? Is it cat5? We use it as the wire for inside our walls and use normal patch cables to connect to computers.

 

[MedicBob]

How many wires and what colors?

I am pretty sure you shouldn't but putting shielding inside the connectors though.

 

[cipher00]

We need more info to answer this. One guess if there's a bunch of wires: many homes today are built with multi-cable wires all bound together (phone, tv cable, cat5, alarm...).

 

[alexXx]

It has the same number of wires as cat5. Each twisted pair is covered with a translucent blue plasticy layer.

 

[spidey07]

doesn't sound like cat5 or any other category rated cable.

check the cable jacket - that should tell you what it is.

 

[loup garou]

Got a digicam/hosting? A pic would help. 🙂
Otherwise, as spidey said, the cable jacket should tell you what it is.

 

[masked1]

might be a cross over cable????

 

[alexXx]

Ok here is a pic of the network cable.
Sorry for the fuzzyness, it was my sisters camera i was using and dont know how to put it on macro
Network cable

EDIT: there are infact 4 twisted pairs, two of them are inline with the camera..

 

[DnetMHZ]

Perhaps STP (Shielded Twisted Pair)

 

[Dowfen]

I had some underground rated CAT5 that looked like that (not exactly, though) with lots and lots of shielding. So much so that I couldn't use a regular crimp-on connector as the wires were a little bit bigger than 24guage.

It was mentioned above though that the cable should have a code on it.

 

[loup garou]

Originally posted by: dnetmhz
Perhaps STP (Shielded Twisted Pair)

All the STP I've seen just has all the pairs shielded. I've never seen each pair shielded.

Then again, I'm no cable guru.

Strange stuff, alexXx!

 

[alexXx]

yea on closer inspection, each twisted pair is covered with a blueish foil, and that is wrapped in a transparent plastic layer. Each twisted pair also has its own ground wire(just a bare wire)