Title. While doing some other work, he realised that underneath the console where his TV went, there were a bunch of cables from past-inhabitants-of-this-house’s cable TV setups.
He reasoned he’d solve this by sawing off those unseemly white cables, thus opening space for new stuff.
Except… The ethernet cable that connected the internet router to the Switch that routed it all over the house, connecting to our shared family homeserver and such? Yeah, it was also white, and also down there.
So. My dear ol’ dad took a saw to his internet. And chopped it down. Now he’ll need to call someone to run the cables through the walls again (this is Brazil. Walls are solid concrete. Running new cables through walls is NOT easy!)
EDIT: It is fixed. And all it took was me and the technician spending 8 hours running around the apartment, pushing/pulling cables into/from holes in the wall, and yelling “DO YOU SEE ANY MOVEMENT?”
It is just 8 copper wires. They can be spliced. It is better to do so with a simple solder connection. There is no real magic. If it is shielded, there is a little more hassle to connect the shielding. It is better to avoid adding extra connectors whenever possible because the transition to different metals will cause attenuation in addition to the resistance of the connector overall. Inside it is just 4 twisted pairs that must be matched 1:1 on each side. The pairs are twisted because it is a differential electrical signal so the twisting helps cancel out interference noise along the length. It is important that each pair of wires is very close to the same length. It is not very hard to do this. I make my own Ethernet cables all the time.
Soldering probably isn’t the best solution for Ethernet cables, and it’s unclear how much slack there may be in what’s left of the cables. It may be prudent to terminate each end in jacks and bridge them with a short patch cable.
The connector is soldered to the boards at each end at the device. Should we stop the world and redo all of them. There is no magic in copper traces or wires. Solder is far better than multiple mechanical connections with nickel plated pins to multiple connectors. That is a great way to attenuate signals massively. Every connector in the path is a problem.
No, Ethernet cables aren’t soldered into boards; they plug into jacks which are.
It is all the same! I design and etch circuit boards because it is easier than point to point wiring. There is no magic here. The connector is soldered to a copper trace but that trace is not magic. It is only a wire that is easier to sort and organize with the complexity of the circuit. I can and have replaced those traces many times with point to point wires. It makes no difference.
What makes the most difference is the mechanical point to point contact through whatever grime and junk is present combined with oxides and the very limited contact surfaces.
I have made Ethernet devices and circuits many times in hobby circuit board projects. This is a none issue.
Yeah, I do all that too, personally and professionally.
I’ve also run Ethernet through three different houses.
Anyway, the main point is that it’s going to be a lot easier to attach some connectors than to solder some bare solid wires hanging in midair.