RJ45 cable s are a quite common standardized type of cable used to connect two or more devices together to form a network. A network is a collection of devices connected together in order to share information between one another. The types of devices that can be connected in a network include: computers, printers, laptops, routers, switches or hubs. Devices that are networked together using RJ45 cables use the cables to transmit and received information between each other. Specifically, RJ45 cables are used in Ethernet networking technologies. Both voice data and digital data are capable of being transmitted on a network using RJ45 cables.
An RJ45 cable looks similar to a standard telephone cable, but there is a key difference: an RJ45 cable is slightly wider than a standard telephone cable. Each RJ45 cable contains eight different wires, each of which are a different color, and the RJ45 cables are inserted into an RJ45 connector on each device to form the physical connection.
When configuring a computer network, technologies that use physical cables, such as RJ45 cables, are often preferred to technologies that do not use physical cables, such as wireless or Wi-Fi technologies. There are many reasons for this. One advantage is that wired technologies, like RJ45 cables, provide more stability. That is, they often offer the best potential for faster data transfer speeds than wireless technologies. RJ45 cables also have fewer errors than wireless technologies and are more secure since it is more difficult for data to be intercepted and tampered with using physical cables.
Despite being standardized, all RJ45 cables are not the same. There are many different grades (which are referred to as categories) of RJ45 cables that are available. For example, Category 1, Category 2, Category 4, Category 5, etc. These are often abbreviated as: Cat 1, Cat 2, Cat 4, Cat 5 and so on. As a general rule, the higher the category number the greater the data transfer rate of the RJ45 cable.