Cat5e Patch Panels

[Dave Liquorice]

Also in the wiring cupboard with all the coax are a goodly number of Cat5e cables. These need to terminated on patch panels.

Looking about you can pay anything from < £10 to > £100 for a 1U 24 port Cat5e panel. I can't really believe that something less than a tenner can be anything but spherical due to the number of corners being cut. And those > £100 are out of the question on price alone.

Anyone recomend make/model/supplier of decent quality, reasonably priced, 1U 24 port Cat5e patch panels, with at least a cable management bar.

[Dave Liquorice]

There are 45 cables... and they seem to breeding four more appeared yesterday from the loft. So it'll probably be 3 x 24 port panels (2 for "outs" and 1 for "ins").

It'll probably be a home made "rack", one of the switches comes with rack cheeks, the other can probably have something attached to fit it into a rack. The router and the modem are more "desktop" so probably be mounted on a plain rack shelf.

[John Rumm]

Yup, the Excel stuff is very good:

Well made and easy to wire. They only mark all their stuff with TIA568B pattern colours so you don't need to stop and think each time or worry about getting mismatched ends. They have also seemed to master the punch down where its easy to pull wires into the first part of the terminal by hand and they stay put - so its quite realistic to push all wires into place and then punch them all down in one batch.

I always pair them with these modules:

Same story - easy to see and easy to wire. They are a little deeper than some though, so use the domed faceplates:

[Charles F]

If you are already allocating space for a 19" patch panel, and already know you need a 24 way panel, it might be worth thinking about a 2 row 48 way. That way you can allocate a block of (say) four or five sockets per room, even though you don't need them all now. When in the future you need more cables in a particular room, as I have gradually done, the new cable can by added to the correct predesignated block on the panel, avoiding an eventual random scatter of sockets across the panel.

Also, are you using cat 5 for landline phones with adaptors? If so, you will probably need a kroned parallel strip on the patch panel, which might be tight on a 24 way, but on a 48 there's lots of space.

It's a bit more expensive now, but I think good future proofing.

Charles F

[rick]

I bought a mini cab ... used 2 x 24 way CAT5e patch panels. They were made by EXCEL

I also have blank plates I drilled and fitted F-type bulkhead connectors and use for video patching for the CT100 I installed to each room.

[Dave Liquorice]

48 isn't really big enough... 3 x 24's should be ok but I really need to count what goes where and the function. There are several Cat5's that are being used for other devices that don't use ethernet.

I think I'd have thought of that when laying out bundles of four cables from each from against the groups of six sockets...

Analogue phone line how quaint. B-) It's here, carries ADSL but isn't used to make voice calls, occasional incoming, 50% of which are from Microsoft Support offering us a fix for our compromised PC...

[Charles F]

And I thought I had a lot of cat 5 cables!

Charles F

[rick]

I have a large house .. and found 48 enough for me ...

pairs of CAT 5 to every room. I used MK faceplates ... either just CAT5, or with a blank plate alongside - in which I fitted an F-Type connector. MK units have krone connectors at rear. F-Type were crimped.

Meant I could use standard plastic drywall boxes.

Near TV I used double boxes so had plenty of connectors.

Wired up so I can patch home or business phone line or Ethernet to any socket (use pabx adapaters for phones)