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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](https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/a/42697/8499) 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
  • 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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