Diagnosing poor wired network speed using new Cat6a cable?

[CubsWin]

I just had an electrician out today to fish multiple wires in my house, one of which was a Cat6a cable that I ran from my router location to the basement (75 ft of cable).

The cable is terminated with a Cat6 punch down keystone jack on my router end and the other end still has the original connector on it.

When I connect the cable to a device in the basement, I am getting very finicky performance. One of my gigabit switches won't even make a connection with it, while the other switch of the same brand does. When I connect the cable directly to my laptop ethernet port, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. In all cases, when a connection is made, I am getting about 9 Mbps from Speedtest. By comparison, I get 25 Mbps over wifi. I get the same 25 Mbps when going directly from my router to my laptop and bypassing the Cat6a cable.

How can I diagnose this problem? I'm not sure the guy really knew what he was doing with the keystone jack, so is it possible something is wrong on that end? Would it have anything to do with the jack being Cat6, but the cable being Cat6a? I didn't think it mattered, but I could certainly be wrong.

I hate to think that it might be a problem with the cable itself, because I spent a lot of money on having the cables fished and I don't really think it is an option for me to have it done again.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

 

[bill001g]

Why you ran cat6a to hook to a home router in the first place sounds like the electrician scammed you. That cable is designed to run with 10g ports. Sure maybe some years in the future you might find a device with 10g ports that you can afford in your house but I highly doubt any ISP will be delivering 10g.

He should have used keystones designed for 10g to match. Cat6 technically is no better than cat5e it still is only rated to 1g. It should all run at 1g no matter what combination was installed.

In any case it sounds like the connections are not made correctly. He should have tested the install with a TDR which can actually verify that the cables meet the requirements. Sounds like you had a electrician who does not run data cables as a primary business and does not really know what he is doing.

The wire itself will have no issues especially being cat6a. The easy one to try is to cut off the wire on the keystone side and re punch it down being sure to match the wire colors. although a actual punch down tool makes for a cleaner installation anything is very thin will allow the wires to be fully seated into the connection. The other end you need to be sure follows the color pattern for 568a or 568b you want both ends to match. Cutting and replacing that end will require a special tool so it may be cheaper to buy a keystone and put that on the end. You should be able to buy keystones at the home improvement store and a cat5e will work just as good as any other one you find since you only have gig switches. If you were ever to get 10g stuff you could replace the keystones. 10g is close to impossible even in large servers because of bottlenecks in the disk technology. You would have to have ssd arrays and even they can't run 10g.

 

[CubsWin]

Why you ran cat6a to hook to a home router in the first place sounds like the electrician scammed you. That cable is designed to run with 10g ports. Sure maybe some years in the future you might find a device with 10g ports that you can afford in your house but I highly doubt any ISP will be delivering 10g.

He should have used keystones designed for 10g to match. Cat6 technically is no better than cat5e it still is only rated to 1g. It should all run at 1g no matter what combination was installed.

In any case it sounds like the connections are not made correctly. He should have tested the install with a TDR which can actually verify that the cables meet the requirements. Sounds like you had a electrician who does not run data cables as a primary business and does not really know what he is doing.

The wire itself will have no issues especially being cat6a. The easy one to try is to cut off the wire on the keystone side and re punch it down being sure to match the wire colors. although a actual punch down tool makes for a cleaner installation anything is very thin will allow the wires to be fully seated into the connection. The other end you need to be sure follows the color pattern for 568a or 568b you want both ends to match. Cutting and replacing that end will require a special tool so it may be cheaper to buy a keystone and put that on the end. You should be able to buy keystones at the home improvement store and a cat5e will work just as good as any other one you find since you only have gig switches. If you were ever to get 10g stuff you could replace the keystones. 10g is close to impossible even in large servers because of bottlenecks in the disk technology. You would have to have ssd arrays and even they can't run 10g.

The electrician certainly didn't scam me. He installed the Cat6a by my request and I understand full well that there is no benefit to Cat6a in my current network. I just wanted to future-proof as much as possible since I was already having to pay for the wires to be fished.

With that said, it sounds like the connection at the wall is the most likely culprit, so I will buy another keystone jack and try that. I'm pretty sure I already have a punch down tool somewhere, so I'll try to hunt that down.

 

[CubsWin]

I received my new 6a keystone jack today and took the plate off the wall to install it and the problem became obvious fairly quickly. The guy who installed the old jack apparently had no idea how to terminate it because he had wires punched down into the wrong slots for no apparent reason. I could have understood if he had made the mistake of following 568a instead of 568b, but instead he didn't follow any pattern whatsoever. I am amazed that I was even getting intermittent connections with the way it was wired.

After installing the new 6a jack to the correct 568b specifications, everything is connecting fine and matching my wifi speeds.

I should clarify that the electrician wasn't the person who installed the original keystone. I had a Comcast installer at the house at the same time and he asked "do you want me to connect this jack too?" I asked if he knew how to do it and he said yes, so I trusted that he would install it properly. That was clearly the wrong assumption. I just thought I would clarify so as not to give electricians a bad name!

Thank you for your assistance.