Wires

Ethernet Socket

I grew up in the age of wire. If you wanted to use anything electrical, you needed wires. Now a days we've got sixteen flavors of wireless and some of them, like cell phones, are pretty reliable. Others like WiFi can be a little iffy. We need an Ethernet link in the laundry room. Wifi sort of worked there, but not reliably, so my solution, being as I am a wire guy, was to run a wire from the central hub.

Actually, the wire was already in place. When we built the house 25 years ago I had phone lines run from all the rooms in the house to one spot in the basement. Phone lines have six wires. Telephones only require two, and Ethernet only requires four, so we have enough wires installed to have computers and telephones in every room. Didn't use them all, but they were there if we ever needed them and today I needed one.

So I attached connectors to both ends of the wire. I did have to figure out which wire ran to the laundry room, but that wasn't too tough. There was already a phone there, so I just had to disconnect phone lines until it stopped working. It would have been better if someone had labeled all those wires. Maybe next time. Anyway, figured out which cable, attached Ethernet connectors, plugged one end of a patch cord into the cable and the other end into the hub, and plugged the computer into the other end up in the laundry room and . . . bupkis. #$%^^. Fine. There is an outlet in the family room, just string a 50 foot cable across the house and plug in the computer and we are up and running.

Continuity Tester

But what's wrong with the cable that runs directly to the laundry room? I dig out my handy dandy, 3 volt test light, sacrifice a patch cord to make a test plug (just short pairs of wires together), plug it into the socket in the laundry room, run downstairs for the umpteenth time, and use the test light to see if we have continuity. No, we don't. We have bupkis. Am I not holding my mouth right? I disconnect the phone wires and repeat the test on those wires with the same result. But the phone works, so maybe three volts is not enough. If we were dealing with hundreds of feet of cable, I could see how three volts might not be enough, but we're talking maybe 25 feet. Something stinks.

P.S. Yes, I know the socket has eight contacts, but Ethernet works fine with just four wires. Near as I can tell, the only reason we have eight contacts is so you can't plug in a telephone, or plug an Ethernet cable into a phone socket.