I will change the switch to Cat6 next week, but I need the net to work with the old switch for a few days.
What happens when you plug a Cat6 cable to a cat5 port ?
Use Cat6 cables on a Cat5 switch
cat6lanswitch
Related Solutions
Blue and Blue white are center pair too. If you punch everything down into an RJ 45 jack (ehternet jack) then an RJ 11 (phone jack 2 pair) can plug into an RJ 45 jack and use center 2 pair. Lines up perfectly. Then the line can be used for RJ 45 or RJ 11 purposes. Good Luck!
I am trying to wire two Ethernet jack ports into a trailer outback so two computers can plug into the wall at the same time. I have one long CAT6 cable with an rj45 connector on one end that is plugged into the router in the main house, and loose wires on the other end.
OK.
Do I need to wire two jacks into the other side of this one cable and plug it into two ports in the router?
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer:
CAT6 (and cat 5 and ..) cables have 8 wires. 4 of those for 10/100Mbit Ethernet. All eight are used for gigabit speeds.
This means that you can split one 8 wire cable into two sets on both ends and run two 100mbit connections over it. You can do this either by creative wiring both ends, or you can use existing plugs similar to these:
This will effectively wire your network like this:
This is likely not officially supported, but it works well enough.
Note that you cannot run gigabit speeds over these cables anymore. You no longer have the 8 wires per connection needed for that.
If you have any electrical power in the trailer (and I presume you do, if for nothing than to run the computers off), then the proper answer becomes a 'do not do this, but a switch instead'. 4 port switches are dirt cheap, do not limit your speed down to 100Mbit and will save you a lot of time.
If you do no have power and are running one or more laptops on battery, then consider these cheap pre-made plugs over building your own cable. Keeping things standard is a good thing.
Best Answer
What makes Cat 5 and 6 cables different are their electrical specifications and therefore signal transmission capabilities. Category 6 cable has better specifications than 5 or 5e, enabling it to so support faster data transmission when installed with compatible devices.
However, Cat 6 cable is backward compatible with previous specifications, and it can be deployed in networks using older hardware without problems. In fact, it's typical to use newer cabling types when upgrading a physical network infrastructure, even though the hardware is still using older standards. This is how a network admin can get newer cable installed in preparation for a future time when newer hardware will be deployed.
Bottom line: You can do what you're planning and it will work just fine.