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I am not looking for a specific product recommendation. I am looking for a category of cable tester devices, so I can do a targeted search.

I have an rj45 cable tester that tests the ethernet cables with on/off switches. I learned that all wires in an ethernet cable can show connected, but the cable cannot sustain the actual frequencies required for gigabit (80 MHz) or 10-gigabit (156.25MHz) senarios.

What is the category name of devices that test ethernet cables with realistic frequencies?

Allan Xu
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  • Yes, of course they exist, and they are called cable testers. You need a real cable tester, not the toy someone markets as a cable tester. A real cable tester can perform the category test suite for the cable category. See this answer for the basic required tests. By the way, it really is not an "ethernet cable." it is a UTP cable, and ethernet is one of the applications for which it can be used. – Ron Maupin Sep 26 '21 at 03:20
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    Also, you get what you pay for, so expect to pay a lot for a real cable tester. – Ron Maupin Sep 26 '21 at 03:25

1 Answers1

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What you're looking for is a cable tester able to certify a cable with the entire test suite. The tests must include crosstalk and detailed frequency measurement.

Basically, there are three classes of testers:

  1. just continuity and shorts - 5-100 €
  2. additionally wire map (proper pairings), overall length, possibly rough frequency response (cable class) - 200-800 €
  3. entire test suite including all the crosstalk variants (NEXT, FEXT, ...), detailed frequency response, between-pair skew etc; this answer (see comment above) goes more into detail - 1,500-10,000 €

For the latter classes, there are (price) differences depending on the highest cable class that can be handled. Older testers can only do Category 5/5e, current ones at least Cat 6 or 6A, and the best ones Cat 8.1 and 8.2.

Zac67
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