What is the difference between a straight thru ethernet cable and whatever the other kind of cable is?
I was at Best Buy looking for a Ethernet Cable and the employee asked me if I wanted Straight Thru or _____. (I forgot what the other kind was.) What is the difference and when would it matter?
4 Responses
Taba
07 Sep 2010
Megasparks0101
07 Sep 2010
or cross over, a cross over cable will allow u to hook up a computer to a computer or a hub to a hub router to a router ect…a straight through would do a computer to a router or computer to modem
Colinc
07 Sep 2010
Your network card use a pair to send and another pair to receive. A switch or router turn this round by receiving on the pc’s sent pair and sending back to it’s receiving pair. So a standard cable is straight through. If you connect 2 pcs together you need a cross-over cable to make this conversion, otherwise 1 pc would be sending to the other’s send connection. Older network hubs needed cross-over cables to extend to other hubs, or an uplink port to create the cross. Nowadays switches and routers autodetect other hubs and switches and perform the cross-over at the port.
dmdan
07 Sep 2010
Straight means that the cable’s wire run straight through, while cross over means that the transmission wires are crossed over to the reception end and the reception wires are crossed over to transmission end.
The is no difference in speed, it’s just a method of communicating. It depends on the hardware. To connect a computer or modem to a switch/hub/router, you use straight. To connect two computers to each other, you use a crossover cable.
There is straight thru Ethernet cable and there is crossover ethernet cable.
You would use the crossover cable when you are connected from one computer directly to another computer. The crossover cable takes the transmitted signal from one computer and sends it to the receiver of the second computer and vice versa.
The straight thru cable is used when you are connecting two or more computers to a router, switch or hub. The router, switch or hub then takes the transmitted signal and connects it to the correct wire automatically to be transmitted to the other computers receiver and vice versa. It would be easier if I could paste a picture to show you but I dont have one handy.