Understood, and thank you for taking the time to explain it!

So, taken the wife's new work laptop down to the faceplate, 100mb, reconnect directly to the router, 1000mb so your right on that. I can't see much of the cable, only Cat6 Samson 23 AWG UTP, so would this just need re-crimping on the face plate, is there any form of Cat6 that isn't 1GB capable?

Cheers!

Cat 6, Cat6a even good old Cat5e no problem for 1000BaseT.

There’s numerous things that could be wrong, but usually not that hard to resolve. A simple, cheap 8-position continuity tester is usually a great help to diagnose faults. You can get them on Amazon for around a tenner.

Are both ends of the new cable link terminated on RJ45 jacks/sockets in faceplates or has the installer crimped on a RJ45 plug at one end and the other end is punched down onto a jack/socket into faceplate?

Surely one for the installer to sort out rather than the OP (or was it an unofficial job)?

End in the living room is a face plate, other end comes from the faceplate, out the house, up the walls etc, straight to the router, no faceplate that end. Think he opted to do that as he used an existing hole which was next to the fibre cable coming in and didn't want to damage the fibre...

Proper AV fellow, checkatrade and all that! I have ordered a cable tester, should arrive tomorrow. Spoken to the contractor as well, he's gonna discuss tomorrow.

In reply to a post by dect:

we use to colour our crossover cables in red so they could easily be identified

Back in the day and it was totally not politically correct but all cross over cables used to be pink where ever I have worked. I have a feeling it was a Cisco thing. It still grates to see blue cables to carrying anything other than RS232. These days pink means OM4 which means it's a 40Gbps link.

In reply to a post by Bamster:

Proper AV fellow, checkatrade and all that! I have ordered a cable tester, should arrive tomorrow. Spoken to the contractor as well, he's gonna discuss tomorrow.

By rights (doing things correctly/by the book):

1. Fixed building structured cabling, is much like electrical cabling, in that it is solid core (not stranded). Therefore it should always be terminated/punched down onto IDC contacts on either RJ45 jacks/sockets or RJ45 patch panels (or if your really old fashioned like me 110 style panels). Most folks especially in residential settings and especially AV dudes, sparks and mom and pop/DIYers ignore this and crimp an RJ45 plug onto the fixed cabling. This saves time/money blah blah but isn't the best long term especially if that solid core cabling gets moved about - it can eventually break internally - which is why....

2. Fly-leads / patch cords are known as "work area cables" they use a stranded core construction, which makes them nice and flexible. They are designed to be bent, twisted and generally [censored] about by end users ands still work for years.

3. A good installer always tests every fixed cable that they install. No one is perfect and structured cabling is very easy to fudge up. A really kosher installer will use a performance tester to ensure the cabling meets EIA/TIA Category standards (or the ISO equivalent Class) - however given that Fluke testers are the better part of £10K and most installers that do residential installs won't have the turnover (or expectation form their clients) for this level of gear.

They could however do a continuity test which is quick, cheap, easy and eliminates 90% of faults.

Hope its all works out well and its made good.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

Back in the day and it was totally not politically correct but all cross over cables used to be pink where ever I have worked. I have a feeling it was a Cisco thing. It still grates to see blue cables to carrying anything other than RS232. These days pink means OM4 which means it's a 40Gbps link.

Not sure why we used red (and a deep red at that certainly not pink) they were made up on site maybe the person who started it where I was had a problem with their eye sight (thats assuming I don't) and it should have been pink

Red was/is a pretty standard colour to denote crossovers.

Not sure if anyone here remembers the “original” AT&T / Lucent / Avaya now CommScope ‘110’ system - it was all the rage in the nineties - mostly on big commercial installs with lots of copper terminations. Kind of fell out of favour toward the end of the nineties and folks went with RJ45 patch panels.

Back then we used to terminate all the copper into/from the PBX on Krone blocks and all the structured cabling went back to 110 blocks. Was really space efficient, but it wasn’t for the novice / beginner.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Red was/is a pretty standard colour to denote crossovers.

Not sure if anyone here remembers the “original” AT&T / Lucent / Avaya now CommScope ‘110’ system - it was all the rage in the nineties - mostly on big commercial installs with lots of copper terminations. Kind of fell out of favour toward the end of the nineties and folks went with RJ45 patch panels.

Back then we used to terminate all the copper into/from the PBX on Krone blocks and all the structured cabling went back to 110 blocks. Was really space efficient, but it wasn’t for the novice / beginner.

Back in my BT days we use to support a few customers with AT&T structured wiring, half the time we would go out because NDT on an extension and it would turn out to be on the structured cabling, didn't help that a lot more of the extension number switches could be done via programming meaning the extensions weren't always where they was expected to be on the structured cabling.

Just stuck a cable tester on the end. Lights 2-8 light up, but 1 doesn't, so I assume thats bad given I tested it on a cable and all lights lit up. I'll pick up with the contractor