Someone might mix Cat 5 and Cat 6 cables to achieve better performance or compatibility in a network setup.
Someone might mix Cat 5 and Cat 6 cables to achieve better performance or compatibility in a network setup.
I've been in my apartment for 12 years now and never bothered checking what was behind my RJ-11 wall jacks. I recently did, and found Cat 5e wires, so I ran to my cabinet where my cable comes into, and pulled 4 Cat 5e cables out of the wall! I got super excited, purchased a bunch of RJ-45 keystones, and am waiting for them to arrive. In the meantime though, I pulled out a few of these just to see if they were all wired up, and they are, but I found one that is causing my brain to hurt. I'm hoping someone in here can give me some ideas as to why I found a Cat 5E cable and a Cat 6 cable spliced together, and then further spliced into another Cat 5E which was hooked up to this one wall jacks keystone (photos below). Any ideas at all would be appreciated! I'm pretty sure no one will know for sure, but maybe you've seen something like this before, or done something like this before that can help me narrow down the purpose. I'm posting some pictures to help understand whats going on. In the first picture, I removed some of the tape that was holding all these together so you can see what's been done. The brown stranded and solid wires were not connected (since it was hooked up to an RJ-11). Picture 2 is how I found it, but only after I already cut off the RJ-11 keystone. As you can see there is a Cat 5e that comes out from the box, and a Cat 6 that comes out from the box, and they are spliced together to the one cat 5e that was connected to the keystone. I can't find a Cat 6 cable anywhere else in the apartment, and I even went down to the basement and couldn't find a Cat 6 anywhere in the basement cabinet. I'm pretty sure I can just get rid of the Cat 6 since it doesn't come into my cabinet. I'm waiting for my RJ-45 tester to arrive since I'm not a pro and didn't have one, but in the meantime I just connected the brown wires to keep everything the way they were (see photos below). I believe it should work this way too, but I'd prefer to get rid of the cat 6 since this happens to be the outlet that would be connected to my home server, so I don't want to risk any issues. Any advice would be appreciated!
It might have been just one extra segment of CAT6, while the person doing it simply had what they needed available then.
@Skipple I understand your concern, but I'm not sure why someone would make such a choice. I'm weighing whether to use the Cat 5e cable alone or fix the splice so the brown wires are also connected. I've already done the splice, but I'm not happy with the result—my photos show the work after I connected the brown wires. This setup would link all eight wires together for internet use instead of phone, which seems like a better option. The Cat 6 didn't help me much; I'm not sure why it was chosen. @porina your reasoning makes sense, but why connect to another jack in my room? @shoutingsteve You're right about the cat 6 confusion. If the person had cat 6, they should have used it throughout the apartment. I think porina's explanation fits the situation.