Incorrectly terminated network cables - How much can you get away with?

[Mike1983]

Hi all

I'm no networking expert but I've put in a pretty decent home network as a hobby / necessity.

At time of installation 3 years ago, the test I applied to determine cable integrity was to simply plug in my laptop at the various wall sockets, verify I could connect to the internet and check I got the full gigabit connectivity LED on the switch.

I have now puchased a cheap cable tester (that I realise I should have done 3 years ago!) that has flagged up some of my wall sockets have been wired incorrectly (crossed cores). Mainly swapping the white dashed cores with their full colour counterparts. All sockets however show up as full gigabit and enable LAN / WAN connectivity.

I'm pretty certain that some of the cables will not have that much slack left on them so I'm reluctant to reterminate them. If necessary though, I could do this when I get free time.

My question is... if I've currently got LAN / WAN / Gigabit connectivity, should I bother putting the cabling right? Will keeping it in it's current state cause complications in future?

Thanks

 

[Phal]

Incorrect wiring can certainly cause problems even if the connectivity seems to be stable.

Guess you could test reliability and throughput first to see if you can find a problem

 

[ots3go]

If you've created cross over cables behind the wall, Auto-MDIX will detect it and correct it for you.

I can't see this feature being removed in the future so for all intents and purposes, you should be fine.

If you're not experiencing late collisions or the connection dropping to 100mb/s or half duplex you should be okay.

 

[dave-lew99]

Swapping the solid core with it's own dashed counterpart won't cause any problems - it is still the same pair at the end of the day.

Breaking up the pairs will cause problems but swapping them about won't. For gigabit the following pins in the connector should be wired using a pair -

1-2
3-6
4-5
7-8

As long as those pins are in their own pair (ie 7-8 is usually brown white and brown) there isn't an issue (and it's the same on both ends)

 

[Mike1983]

Thanks guys.

Not experienced any reduced connectivity and the sample check I made was restricted to the swapping of dash / solid colours only so I guess I'm in the clear.

Thanks