If you recollect, in last week’s Gearhead I was left waiting for AT&T to bestow a DSL connection on my new house and in last week’s Backspin I tracked a little more of my torturous path out of comms hell. Well, I’m glad to report that AT&T eventually came through on Friday! Yep, Friday morning at 9:30 a.m. I had working DSL service. Things were looking up … for a while.
First my DSL modem, a 2Wire 2701HG-E, seemed to have lost its ability to produce a stable Wi-Fi service so my laptop would attempt to connect, get somewhere in the process, fail, then start all over again. Great, now I have the pleasure of wrangling with AT&T’s customer service organization to get a new modem. Whoppee.
Click to see: Image of 2Wire 2701HG-B
Next came wiring the house. Now I’ve done enough Ethernet wiring over the past few years to be reasonably clued so I knew what I was doing. Prior to the DSL service putting in its belated appearance, I’d had Cat-5 cable dragged under the house and fished up the walls to old work low-voltage brackets so I made a quick trip to Fry’s Electronics (well, as quick as a stop in Fry’s can be … it is, after all, the nerd’s candy store) for some keystone jacks (keystone jacks are the female connectors that snap into keystone modular wall plates).
Click to see: image of a keystone jack
Now, having just moved, there was the predictable game of “where did I pack X” to be played for just about everything that matters and, not surprisingly, my 110 punchdown tool was AWOL.
Click to see: Image of punchdown tool
So, when I was in Fry’s and saw CAT-66 “toolless” keystone jacks made by Cables Unlimited (who produce lots of cool products) I thought “Wonderful! No tool needed! I can save myself $20 by not having to buy another punchdown tool!”
Click to see: Iimage of a keystone jack
Curiously, I can’t point you to this product on either Fry’s site or on Cable’s Unlimited site. The Fry’s product ID (4027692) isn’t, according to its Web site, a “toolless” product, and neither does the Cables Unlimited code on the pack (UTP-7100B-5) show up on the Cables Unlimited site as “toolless.” I was, apparently, using a product that appears not to exist. (Except over on the CablesToGo site) but without any attribution to Cables Unlimited … very odd.)
And not existing would have, as it turned out, been much preferred by me. After wrestling with these inventions of Satan for about four hours I went and found my punchdown tool (this took a good 40 minutes as it was in the same box as my old vinyl records … I have no idea why) then went back to Fry’s to purchase good old standard, reliable, Unicom 110-type keystone jacks.
So, let me explain why the toolless keystone jacks are of the Devil’s design. First, they require that you feed the wires around minuscule posts which would be no problem if you had teeny tiny, child-like fingers. For normal adults, this is, at best, tricky. How to do this is also not clear as there are no instructions on the packaging or anywhere on the Web that I could find.
Second, when you close the cap that pushes the wires onto the pins that cut through the wires’ insulation to make a connection it’s hard to ensure that the wires stay put and are taut enough to engage the pins.
In short, these jacks are a triumph of hope over design.
I’ve since been told they work better with braided conductors and, of course, my cable has solid single core wires but how would anyone know this? This information is missing along with the how to use instructions.
Once I went to standard 110-type jacks the first connection was painless. So was the second. The third, and one of the longer runs, was, of course, faulty. Yep, somewhere in a run of about 75 feet there was a break in one conductor so I had to get my wiring guy back in to drag a whole new cable. I must have done something wrong in a previous life.
So, what did I learn? First, pack your tools in one place when you move. Second, don’t use new fangled components that don’t exist. Third, expect wiring to be a complete pain in the %$#. The non-existent Cables Unlimited CAT6 “toolless” keystone jacks get a rating of 0 out of 5. Definitely not recommended (Fry’s? I’ll be back to return the “toolless” keystone jacks).
Gibbs is now wired in Ventura, Calif. Connect to gearhead@gibbs.com.
