Handmade cabling or factory made?  It is a question that can bring up technical terms that sound more at home on the Enterprise than they do in a server room, such as standing harmonic waves, and the loudest proponents of factory cabling are likely to have cut their teeth on coaxial thicknet ethernet cables.  Slashdot is having it out here; the EEs and cabling guys are not getting along too well which makes for a more lively conversation.  Jump in if you have an opinion, otherwise keep cutting your own custom cable, but make sure you test it.

“We have a T1 line coming into our satellite office and we rely fairly heavily on it to transfer large amounts of data over a VPN to the head office across the country. Recently, we decided to upgrade to a 20 Mbit line. Being the lone IT guy here, it fell on me to run cable from the ISP’s box to our server room so I went out and bought a spool of Cat6. I mentioned the purchase and the plan to run the cable myself to my boss in head office and in an emailed response he stated that it’s next to impossible to create quality cable (ie: cable that will pass a Time Domain Reflectometer test) by hand without expensive dies, special Ethernet jacks and special cable. He even went so far as to say that handmade cable couldn’t compare to even the cheapest Belkin cables. I’ve never once ran into a problem with handmade patch cables. Do you create your own cable or do you bite the bullet and buy it from some place?”

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