How to Terminate Ethernet Cables

welcome to crosstalk solutions my name's chris and today we're going to be talking about how to terminate ethernet cables and the tools that i personally use to terminate either male-ended ethernet cables or female-ended ethernet cables now to preface all of this i am not an expert i do not do this for a living but i have terminated hundreds of ethernet cables in my time so i do have a pretty good feel for what works and what doesn't and second there are always a thousand different ways to do things in it if you guys have suggestions for how to improve what i'm showing here today or perhaps particular tools that you've had a really good experience with put those down in the comments below and i would absolutely love to hear that feedback okay so we're going to do some ethernet termination with both cat 5 and cat 6. there's a little bit of difference between these two mainly that the cat6 cable this is actually cat6 plenum and the cat6 plenum has sort of a plastic separator that runs down in between all of the pairs of cable but other than that these are essentially going to be uh identical so for terminating ends to for terminating male ends we'll start there because terminating male ends are my least favorite chore uh i like the female ends where you can actually punch them down a lot better but when i do need to terminate male ends these are what i use so this is the uh easy cat6 uh easy cat6 connectors from platinum tools and they go along with this platinum tools crimper and these are a pass-through connector so essentially the ethernet cables get passed through the end and then you sort of snip them off out of the front we'll show you that in just a second but the first thing that we do whenever we're going to be terminating cat 5 or cat 6 cabling is we need to start by exposing the actual wires inside and taking off this jacket so the way that i do that is with this tool right here there are a number of similar tools this one happens to be from monoprice but you can actually get similar tools on amazon or a lot of other places and i'll have links by the way to all of this stuff down in the description below so the reason that i like this tool is first of all you have just a way to just cut cables off right here but up here in the front we have an adjustable so there's a screw here this allows you to adjust how deep uh these two channels cut so depending on the thickness of your cable essentially you just stick it in here and you clamp it on where you want and you basically just twirl it around a couple times and take it off and then the jacket slides right off just like that so it works really really easily you can also use a pair of traditional wire strippers to do the same thing but i just find it so much easier and more accurate to use one of these when i'm particularly when i'm stripping you know ethernet that is always going to be the same length of cable that i'm stripping so now this cable here is the cat6 plenum and i know that because as soon as i strip away the wires here we've got two things we've got this little tiny string that comes in all of these different ethernet cables so first thing i do is i clip off that little string these are a good pair of snips you can get these at home depot or anywhere but these are invaluable because they can cut through especially thick cables just really easily so we're first just going to cut away this little string right here there we go and then we're left with this sort of honking plastic separator that sticks out here so i just like to cut that off right here at the end and i sort of bend the cables out of the way like so and then i get the snips right up as close as i can just making sure that i'm not actually going to sever any of these cables while i cut and of course you know right now when i'm doing this at my desk it's not a big deal but if you only have a certain amount of cable like if it's already run through the wall and you don't have a lot of slack to spare you want to make sure you're very very accurate with with how you're cutting these so the next thing that i do here is i separate out the pairs and that just basically involves untwisting them and this is kind of one of the more manual processes because look even if even as i've untwisted this you can still see there's a lot of sort of twists in the two individual cables themselves and then you kind of want to just smooth them out with your fingers like so now that's one way of doing it but recently i bought one of these and this is the untwist tool i don't think this is on amazon but i will put a link to this tool down below so this tool basically is a little channel in the middle that separates out the pairs so you can very easily untwist and then additionally it has all of these channels running down the side that allow you to basically just put a cable in like so and stretch it out through the channels and straighten it out really really nicely right so let's take a look at the blue pair now so i just basically separate the tip just a tiny little bit like so and then this tool goes right on and you just twist twist twist and pull it back and it's untwisted the cables now and then you put the cables in the channel and pull and just that easy i have very straight untwisted cables let's do these other ones as well here's the green one we're just going to untwist it a little bit twist twist twist pull out straighten so a few passes straightening and you can see that this is much much quicker and more efficient than trying to do all of these with your fingers and plus you don't wear out your you don't wear out your fingers as much alright so last one here is the brown pair we're gonna open it up stick this on twist twist pull and then straighten all right there we go beautiful now i have all of the cables out and straightened and so it's time to feed them into the male end of the ethernet connector so we're going to grab one of these again this is the pass-through connector so the cables are going to go all the way through and then stick out the end and then this crimp tool will cut off the ends as it pushes down and secures the cables but first we have to get these cables in the correct order so just from doing this a lot i have the order memorized but you can always just go onto google and type you know cat6 wiring diagram and you'll come up with a hundred different pictures that show you exactly how to you know exactly the correct order of cables as they need to go into the ethernet jack alright so we're going to do white orange orange white green then blue then we want to do white blue then green then white brown then brown and so what i'm doing here is i'm just kind of getting them generally in order now they're not perfectly straight yet or anything like that but they're in order and so i want to hold them real tight and i kind of just pull them out like this and then i wave them up and down a little bit sometimes i'll go side to side a little bit what i'm trying to do here is just straighten them out so that they're all right next to each other and in the correct order now if you notice the ends are all sorts of different lengths so once i have them straightened out and in the correct order i kind of put my finger up to the very end and i just want to do a straight cut with my snips right across the front and so now i have all of the cables in the correct order and i've got a flat surface here of across all of the cables so now we can take our connector and we just sort of slide these right in and hopefully it'll go through first try then you kind of just wiggle them wiggle and wiggle them and as you can see the cables came right out the front and then i sort of just squeeze the jacket together and i get the i get it so the end of the jacket is just sticking into the back end of the ethernet connector and there we go now once they're in like this you want to verify that they went in in the correct order because oftentimes things can change so white orange orange white green blue white blue green white brown brown this is the correct order for these cables now we can take our platinum tools crimper and we just stick this guy into the crimper make sure those ends come through as you can see there the ends are sticking out over here and i've got the actual uh connector the cat6 connector right there and then we just give it a good squeeze and so not all of the ends fall off if they didn't all fall off you can kind of just you know play with them a little bit and they should just pretty much fall right off and there we go there we have a nicely done male ethernet connector so we have our male connector uh we can also do a female connector and for the female connector i actually like to use keystone jacks and the reason i use keystone jacks is because they're very versatile so with these keystone jacks we're going to use our punch down tool and we're going to put the cables into the keystone jack so let me hold this up here so we're going to put the cables into the keystone jack the re the one the ones that i use are these ones from cable creation uh product number cl0081 20 pack cat6 keystone module the reason i like these is because they put the pin out so the b pin out is right here on the bottom and you can actually just see exactly where the cables are supposed to go so it's a nice reference you never have to look it up if you forget it's just print it's you know there's a sticker on here that shows you exactly the right cable pin out so now we're gonna take the other end of our cat6 we're gonna strip it off just like that we're gonna snip the little nylon cable or the nylon string and we're gonna separate out our pairs just like we did for the male ethernet connector clip out the plastic separator and now just like the male end cable we need to actually untwist all of these so we'll use our untwist tool this untwist tool by the way i have an extra one and so i'm going to be giving away the extra untwist tool on a live stream or something coming up real soon but i will also put the link to this untwist tool down in the description below okay and now we have our ends straightened and separated and now i always start with the orange and green side so we're going to put these in here like so and i just what i do is i put a bend in the little individual wire and so i put a bend in and i kind of stick it in the right slot and just with my fingers i kind of just give it enough pressure so that it sort of sticks into the keystone jack like so and then we put a little bend into the next one make sure that one gets down and sticks then we've got the greens the green cables as well so here we go green and white green and then usually once i have one side done i will punch down this one side it just makes it easier to stick in there now this is a 110 punch tool you can see the blade on the end is the 110 blade when you're punching down always double check that the cutting side so the longer side of the blade is cutting the right side right because i've done it many times where i accidentally cut the inside and of course that doesn't do you any good because you just severed your cable so you want to just always double check that the cutting end of the 110 blade on the punch down tool is on the outside of where you're punching okay so i've got those punched down these other ends obviously should come right off if they didn't fall off automatically while you were punching them and now we're going to do the other side here so we've got our brown followed by brown white followed by blue and then blue white all right so those are in now we're going to punch down this side again checking where the cutting part of the blade is going [Music] all right and there we go and if it doesn't uh cut perfectly you can just kind of wiggle it and it'll come right off uh without too much effort uh if you are wiggling it and it's not coming off that means that it didn't cut really properly so what you might want to do is just give it another punch down or two and then you should be good to go all right so these keystone jacks come with these little covers to cover everything up nice and neat when you're done punching these just sort of sit on the top and you can just kind of squeeze them in like so and now we've got two ends of a cable one male and one female end now the reason that i like these keystone jacks is because they're very versatile so you can put these keystone jacks into a 24 port keystone patch panel you can put these keystone jacks into a wall plate that has like one two or four keystone holes in the wall plate you can put these keystone jacks into a surface mount box again they're just super super versatile so i just always have a ton of these keystone jacks and then i've got a bunch of options that i can go to in terms of like what i'm actually going to terminate this part into to make a feel a female end connector now when i'm done with everything let me get rid of some of this trash here once i'm done with a cable so you can see i have a full complete cable here i test the cable so i still to this day use the pocket ethernet or poc ethernet i guess uh is how you say it i never really liked how you say that pocket hernett or poc ethernet or poc ethernet i don't know i think it should be pocket ethernet it makes more sense to me but it is what it is so to test this cable we're going to plug one end the mail end here into the poc ethernet and then we're going to plug the female end with a little jumper cable into the wire map side of this tester and by the way there's all kinds of different testing tools you can get ones that aren't as fancy as this one that will just basically tell you if you have all of the pairs in the right order there's also you know up all the way up to like really nice tools that can test all sorts of different cables you know with power over ethernet and all sort of all sorts of good stuff so this one works in conjunction with my phone there's an app so let me turn this guy on there we go we can see the light is on and so on my app we're going to hit connect and that has now connected to the poc ethernet i've selected the wire map and i've selected the tdr which is going to show me the length of the cable and we're going to hit measure and we see four pair straight and it came back as three feet which i think is like about the minimum that it can do but if i click on wire map we can see the pin out and it gave us the the all clear that this table this cable has tested out successfully so i thought i had a cat 5e but actually both of these are cat6 plenum but if you do have cat5e and kid instead of cat6 it's gonna be exactly the same uh the only difference is that there is uh you know you don't have the little plastic separator in cat5e maybe some cat5e does again it there's all sorts of different cables there's indoor rated outdoor rated you know plenum there's cat6 cat 5e cat 7 right so there's all sorts of different cables some of the cables have you know shielding inside of them and whatnot but generally once you expose the wire it's going to be the same process no matter what kind of category of cable you're actually terminating okay so there you go just a quick look at how i personally terminate cables again any feedback suggestions for improvement or anything like that put that down in the comments below i'd love to take a look at that and i'm always looking to try out new tools so if there's something easy like you know i love this um untwist tool like this thing's awesome i just got this and i wish i had this years ago because it just makes it so much easier than trying to you know untw uh untwine those cables with your fingers and then straighten them out with your fingers also this thing is just awesome so i highly recommend the untwist tool all of these products i will have linked down below if you're interested if you guys enjoyed this video make sure you give me a thumbs up if you'd like to see more videos like this please click subscribe my name is chris with crosstalk solutions and thank you so much for watching you

Channel: Crosstalk Solutions

Views: 117,740

Keywords: Terminate Ethernet Cables, crosstalk, crosstalk solutions, rj45, terminate rj45, terminating rj45, terminating ethernet, Ethernet cables, keystone jacks, keystone, rj45 keystone, cat6, cat7, cat5, cat5e, untwist tool, klein tools, platinum tools, fluke networks, T568B, 568B, how to

Id: 2OLeNqsNATQ

Length: 18min 17sec (1097 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021