Looking for min 3m retractable Cat 5e/6 lan cable

BlizzardX · 1 Jul 2019 at 10:52

I'm looking for a longer replacement to my trusty 1.5m retractable lan cable for when I'm out and about with my work tablet. Ideally between 3 and 5 metres would be fab... Ideally looking for something compact, however my searches online have no really discovered anything more than about 2.5m...

Anyone seen anything?

Deleted member 77746 · 1 Jul 2019 at 11:41

I don't think you can get them if I'm honest. The longest I have seen is about 1.5m. What you could do I suppose is buy a 5m flat cable and then design your own reel?

BlizzardX · 1 Jul 2019 at 12:02

Yeah its looking that way. Wanted something fairly small and easy to carry in the laptop bag... I hadn't thought about finding a reel or designing one... will think about that.

bremen1874 · 1 Jul 2019 at 12:11

The cable in those retractable cables probably isn't twisted pair. The flat cables you can buy that are twisted pair wouldn't be thin enough or flexible enough to work in the reels.

For very short cables you'll usually get away with an untwisted cable. As soon as you want something longer you're just asking for unreliable connections.

bledd · 1 Jul 2019 at 12:57

I would just buy a flat cat5e patch lead, they take up minimal space.

Deleted member 77746 · 1 Jul 2019 at 13:10

a 5 meter roll should work perfectly fine. What you not using WiFi for anyway?

BlizzardX · 1 Jul 2019 at 22:46

bledd said:
I would just buy a flat cat5e patch lead, they take up minimal space.

I'll put it simply at 'Lazy'. I currently do this with a bit of Cat 6 cable and its annoying.. just wanted to make something simpler!

BlizzardX · 1 Jul 2019 at 22:48

mrbell1984 said:
a 5 meter roll should work perfectly fine. What you not using WiFi for anyway?

Latency and transfer of large files (sometimes 20GB plus; GIS information)... Corp wifi is slow as crap and my laptop is whitelisted for any LAN connection so I'm one of the lucky ones that can go wired... but as we operate in a hotdesk environment I cannot set up a static environment.

Meddling-Monk · 1 Jul 2019 at 23:18

It's very Ghetto, but you can try this:

Get your max length cable you need (3m, 5m, etc)
Get a small box (like the size of the Amazon FireTV Stick box), something that's just big enough to hold the cable you need.
Get some scissors, punch a hole in opposing sides of the box.
Open the box.
Insert the cable out from the inside of the box on one end.
Roll/Wrap the rest of the cable around itself so that it can fit inside the box.
Leaving a suitable length of usable cable remaining, insert the cable from the inside of the box to the other side on the opposing side you started in the instructions above.
Close the box.
Pull however much cable you need when you need it. Push it back in when you're done.

WJA96 · 3 Jul 2019 at 20:41

Check out Stage Ninja. Not cheap but 5m long and a proper retractable cable. Available in CAT 5 or CAT 6 flavours.