What is the difference between these RJ45 connectors?

[TonyG]

I went in Home Depot yesterday and they had two different packages of RJ45 connectors. One was $8.98 for 25 connectors and the other was $14.69 for 25 connectors. The ony difference I could see is that one said cat5 on it and the other cheaper package did not have the cat5 on it. I can't link directly to them so here are the SKU# for them.

The ones that say for cat 5 have a SKU# of 634453

and the cheaper ones have a SKU# of 634429

homedepot.com

 

[ScottMac]

The ones marked Cat 5 are for networking cables, the unmarked ones are for phone cables. If you use the cheaper connectors for networking, chances are good that they'll work, but they are not recommended for network use, especially above 10Megabit, and may cause intermittent problems.

FWIW

Scott

 

[igiveup]

Well they cheaper ones might have been phone plugs (RJ-11 is what you would look for to verify that its phone, not LAN) but probably not. Cat 5 rated stuff is going to be more expensive than non rated LAN equipment. If it says cat 5 you should be safe. Find cat 5 or even better if they have it would be cat 5e (enhanced, for Gigabit if you should want it in the future).