Be careful buying Cat5e cable

[John Rumm]

Even if only doing one socket at one end you are still going to have a difficult job soldering to an IDC that is buried in a plastic former.

How do you expect to even get the bit of a soldering iron near to the required metal bits? :

best chance might be so solder, carefully heatshrink, then retwist a length of real CAT5E to the end of the CCA* and then terminate that normally. If you start attempting to mess about with soldering a patch panel, you are just going to write off the panel.

• for voice only apps, you could get away with jelly bean crimps since maintaining the twist is less important.

[NT]

Just pull the plastic cover of the IDC connector off. I'm only really suggesting it for an existing install where someone's been lumbered, its quicker than recabling

NT

[Stephen]

Funny you should say that. I received a CPC offer booklet that featured two makes of telephone cable. I could not work out why the one make was cheaper than the other. I bought the cheap one thinking I had got a bargain. It wasn't until it arrived that I looked at the booklet again and noticed one make was CCS and the other was copper.

It would have cost more to post it back that it cost to buy it! I couldn't really ask CPC to refund the postage because they had put CCS in the small print of the advert, but I wonder how many customers noticed the three letters and how many of them knew what it meant?