Best place to purchase a 20m cat5e patch cable?

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Hi,

I've recently purchased a house and currently the router is behind our tv in the living room but I'd like to have a the pc upstairs cables to it so had planned on running a cat5e (around 15-20m) from downstairs through the floorboards to the spare room.

Could anyone recommend a decent place to purchase a cat5e cable of this length as I'm dubious of the very cheap ones available from ebay and amazon.

Thanks
 
If you're running the cable as you describe you may want to consider using solid core cable with a wall mounted faceplate at each end.

How hard would this be to do? I really know nothing about this sort of thing so what benefits would I have over the patch cable?
 
It wouldn't be difficult, but the only real benefit would be cosmetic.

It's like the difference between having a TV aerial feed you can plug into rather than just having a length of cable appearing out of the wall. Routing an unterminated cable could be easier (smaller holes), but that may not be an issue.

If you're lifting floorboards for the install use Cat6 rather than Cat5e.

Have you considered using Powerline adapters instead? According to the reviews the latest AV600 versions are quite impressive, significantly better than earlier generations.
 
It wouldn't be difficult, but the only real benefit would be cosmetic.

It's like the difference between having a TV aerial feed you can plug into rather than just having a length of cable appearing out of the wall. Routing an unterminated cable could be easier (smaller holes), but that may not be an issue.

If you're lifting floorboards for the install use Cat6 rather than Cat5e.

Have you considered using Powerline adapters instead? According to the reviews the latest AV600 versions are quite impressive, significantly better than earlier generations.

The upstairs and downstairs plug sockets are on separate rings would power lines work?
 
Given the amount of effort involved, this is one area where it is pointless cheaping out. Get the best quality cable you can afford from a reputable supplier.
 
For cosmetic point of view putting in a faceplate at either end and running Cat6 would be the better option and then a cat6 patch cable from router to FP and FP to computer would be my best option. You might want to move the PC and then might need a longer cable or might need more than one cable in the future and you could then plug in to a switch and out to devices. Also to clarify all OcUK network cables are copper and not CCA. I would buy that crap for myself and would not want to inflict it on you guys either.
 
For cosmetic point of view putting in a faceplate at either end and running Cat6 would be the better option and then a cat6 patch cable from router to FP and FP to computer would be my best option. You might want to move the PC and then might need a longer cable or might need more than one cable in the future and you could then plug in to a switch and out to devices. Also to clarify all OcUK network cables are copper and not CCA. I would buy that crap for myself and would not want to inflict it on you guys either.

I can't tell if that last sentence is for or against the ocuk cables?
 
It's just confirmation that they aren't selling CCA (copper clad aluminium) cables, so it's a positive. Why the item's description doesn't include that information (or the cable's AWG for that matter) remains a mystery.
 
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The upstairs and downstairs plug sockets are on separate rings would power lines work?

They should work, but probably not as well as they would if they were on the same circuit. Until you plug them in there's no way of knowing how well they'll work in a particular property.
 
I was under the impression that it's best not to have any excess or is this not the case?

Huh? It may look untidy, of course, but you can neatly coil the slack behind something and having a good amount of slack at each end allows flexibility and being able to move the computer or furniture without disconnecting.
 
I will be updating the descriptions for the network cables later on this week. I am busy setting up new WD hard drives this afternoon and making sure I have some SSD deals for this week. :-)
 
As I've no idea with regards to connecting faceplates etc I'll probably just go withthe cat cable available of ocuk.

Thanks for everyone's ideas and help though.
 
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