Can I put Two jacks in series on the end of cat6?

[Upstater]

Hi,
Our house has a cat5 line that runs from downstairs, around the outside of the house to an upstairs office. We are consolidating all the outlets that are randomly spread around the walls. The cat5 cable is about 6 inches too short to reach the new box so we figured we might as well run a new cat6 line. (I think we can make the run 20 feet shorter so that's a bonus.)

The cat5 line has 2 jacks wired in series at either end. Everything I've read says cat6 is much more touchy and you should only expose the minimal amount of wire from the sheathing and don't untwist the pairs more than necessary. Can I put two jacks on each end of the cat6?

Fyi, I picked solid core utp direct burial cable. Any thoughts?
Thanks

 

[bill001g]

Wired in series ? If all 8 wires go to each jack that won't work.

Now if you have split the pairs and run the orange and green pair to one jack and the blue and brown to the other then the short answer is it will work fine limited to 100m.

The longer answer is
There are 2 versions of gig over ethernet. The one that NEEDS cat 6 cable can run on just 2 pair of wires....but this version of gige is not supported by most consumer equipment and is rare on commercial equipment.

The gige that can run over cat5E cable needs all 4 pair. If you split the pairs you do not have that option.
100m only needs 2 pair of cat5E cable.

So you don't need to worry about the twists in the cat6 cable since you really only need it to run a unsupported version of gige.

Cat 6 cable is pretty much a waste of money in most cases, you can either use cat5e or you need cat6a or cat7 to run 10g. In a very short distance you can use cat6 to run 10g. ..........then again I have seen cat6 cheaper than cat5e so it may not matter.

 

[Upstater]

bill001g,
With the cat 5, about 3 inches of sheathing was removed. The first jack was wired in close to the sheathing with a "long tail" of wire that connected the second jack.

I'm not sure if this is not good, only acceptable for cat5 or standard practice.

 

[PhilFrisbie]

You only need to worry about too much sheathing being exposed if you were going to run Gigabit Ethernet, but since you are going to split the pairs you will only get a 100Mbps connection anyway, so it does not matter.

 

[ngrego]

You could always connect the cat5 line comming from your house to a switch on either end and have as many connections as you need.