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Do you know what a ‘crossover cable’ is?
My boss wants me to order new crossover cables for our IT department, but the only thing is I have NO idea what I am looking for! Can anyone quickly explain this to me? Are there any specific brands to look for? Is this a project where I should work with my IT department to find out exactly what they need?
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3 Answers
A cross over cable is a "special" network cable. Without getting too technical, there are 8 wires in a network cable. each end connects the ends of the same wire to the same spot in each connector. A cross over cable just reverses one end.
I would bet someone in your IT department could explain it better and even tell you where to get them inexpensively as they are commonly needed.
Cables typically connect two end devices together. Just like we have male and female, in networking we have MDI and MDIX, or we have DTE and DCE, etc.
When you are connecting to MDI devices together via a cable, it must have a cross-over. When you connect two DTE devices together, you must have a cross-over.
However, many devices today are being designed to facilitate this automatically - your ethernet switch can toggle to be MDI or MDIX depending on the connection on the other end.
Before you can take care of your boss's request, you will need to know what devices the cables are for - Ethernet, Serial, T1, etc. They each are unique, and you will need to order the correct cross-over for the job.
If it is ethernet, simply google ethernet crossover, and I think you will find lots of solutions.
I would check with your IT Dept to see what length cables they need and then visit CDW or some other online vendor and search for 'crossover cable'. I just did this on CDW and it returned a number of different lengths.
Jay
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