Network cable lengths

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Does anyone kow of a piece of equipment that can simulate different lengths of ethernet cable for network testing?

I need to producce a test procedure that test our equipment on a network and i need to find out how long a cable run before it starts to fail. I also need to test this through various swithces and routers so would like a device to adjust cable lengths rather than having to keep changing the cables to set lengths.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Don't think that such a thing exists mate.

You could always just accept what the standards people say is the max length and stay under it.

 

Hi,
You could try here http://www.google.co.uk/pagead/iclk...http://www.openxtra.co.uk/products/test-um.do

I bought Test UM LAN kit from here to audit CAT5e cabling at a remote site and they were very helpful..

G

 

I'd have to go along with Si. I've never seen a network engineer design a system that way. The reason we memorize all that stuff about cable lengths for the Network+ exam is so we won't have to do those sorts of tests.

 

Agreed - that sort of thing doesn't exist. Sure, you might be able to get a longer distance out of a cable length than the recommended maximum... but you might not. Depends on interference, quality of cable, ability of the endpoints to clearly "hear" the signal, etc. Run your cable past an electrical source of interference and you won't come close to the max length.

Simply take reasonable efforts - stay under the maximum cable length and avoid sources of EMI on your cable runs.

 

Called a TDR - time domain reflectometer.

BTW a number of Cisco switches (and some from other manufacturers) have a built in TDR. For example, on a 2960 you can use the built in TDR on any switchport, it will return the length of each of the 4 pairs in the cable, and the staus of the pair. Very handy - sometimes use it to check the length of an odd spool of cable or an unknown run.

Spice_Weasel