Cat8 Colours

iainc · 11 May 2021 at 23:57

Hi All,

I have "installed" a cat8 cable to run from my router round the house to my main PC. I purchased a Cat8 Keystone but am having trouble with the colours.

The Cat8 cable I purchased was a commercial cable which already had jacks on (it was cheaper than buying just cable). The colours in the cable pairs are best described as blue/white , orange/white , green/white, muddy yellow/white.

The colours on my keystone are brown/white, blue/white, white/green or orange, white / orange or green.

I am therefore mystified as to which wires should go where (other than the blue/ white which matches).

Possibly the muddy yellow could be meant to be brown? But then how to know which way to wire the orange & white and Green & white?

I can find an Rj45 pin reference, but my keystone doesn't have pin numbering, so that isn't helping either

Help!

iainc · 12 May 2021 at 00:11

OK- I think I figured out some more, after finding my glasses (I hate getting old - I used to be able to see little letters <sigh>).
It looks like the confusing side is for T568a or T568b. I can now see teeny tiny A and B letters by the colours.

From what I can gather, T568B is the one to go with?

This would mean that I have blue/white , orange/white and green/white which match my cable, leaving the remaining pair to be the brown/white but the brown is more of a muddy yellow IMHO.

AmIRite?

bremen1874 · 12 May 2021 at 00:36

Why are you trying to use Cat8 in the first place? It's completely pointless to use anything beyond Cat6A, and Cat5e is still good enough for most purposes.

The cable you've scavenged from those cables may not be suitable for use with keystones. No way of knowing without having sight of both. If you think that Cat8 is required (it isn't) why are you trying to do it on the cheap?

It doesn't matter whether you use A or B. You just need to be consistent, and B is usually preferred. The colours are the same, just swapped around a bit.

If you can positively identify three of the pairs then it doesn't really matter what colour you think the fourth one is.

If you can't understand the colour codes on the keystones post a picture and someone will probably fill in the blanks.

mikehhhhhhh · 12 May 2021 at 09:07

Realistically, so long as you substitute the same pair of colours and do the same both ends, it'll work just fine.

You may as well use it if you've got it already, but I'd echo bremen1874's sentiments - CAT8 takes up more space and is more difficult to work with for zero gain at home.

Ayahuasca · 12 May 2021 at 09:16

Did someone buy into the marketing spiel on an Amazon listed product?

mikehhhhhhh · 12 May 2021 at 09:23

Haha, incredible.

It's amazing, given that even Cat5e will run multi-gigabit at the sort of distances you can expect to run inside your average home.

iainc · 12 May 2021 at 11:32

bremen1874 said:
Why are you trying to use Cat8 in the first place? It's completely pointless to use anything beyond Cat6A, and Cat5e is still good enough for most purposes.

The cable you've scavenged from those cables may not be suitable for use with keystones. No way of knowing without having sight of both. If you think that Cat8 is required (it isn't) why are you trying to do it on the cheap?s.

We remodelled the lounge and I wanted to run a permanent cable from the Home Hub (now on fibre) round the house to my office. As the cable had to run behind skirting board and through a duct set into the concrete below the lounge door, I wanted to make sure it was pretty futureproof. The only Cat 8 cable I found as actual cable was bright orange which my better half would have taken issue with (although it might have blended with the brickwork more than black to be fair). Hence the purchase of a pre-made exterior grade cable.

WJA96 · 13 May 2021 at 07:07

iainc said:
We remodelled the lounge and I wanted to run a permanent cable from the Home Hub (now on fibre) round the house to my office. As the cable had to run behind skirting board and through a duct set into the concrete below the lounge door, I wanted to make sure it was pretty futureproof. The only Cat 8 cable I found as actual cable was bright orange which my better half would have taken issue with (although it might have blended with the brickwork more than black to be fair). Hence the purchase of a pre-made exterior grade cable.

Words literally fail me. So you did the hard part right and the easy part... not so much. There is a lesson to be learned from this... Any cable run in a duct with a pull-cord is future-proof because you can just replace it. Oh, and if you REALLY wanted future-proof, you could have run a fibre-optic cable.

mikehhhhhhh · 13 May 2021 at 08:35

WJA96 said:
Words literally fail me. So you did the hard part right and the easy part... not so much. There is a lesson to be learned from this... Any cable run in a duct with a pull-cord is future-proof because you can just replace it. Oh, and if you REALLY wanted future-proof, you could have run a fibre-optic cable.

This post is so much more dramatic than simply choosing Cat8 over Cat6

I really don't think the OP was saying there is a duct end-to-end, either.

Hyburnate · 13 May 2021 at 08:39

Upload photos of your cable, the ends, it sounds like it's going to be stranded which means it's not suitable for IDC keystones.