RJ45 Wiring – The Best How To Guide

RJ45 Wiring How to Guide

I’ve recently had some Ethernet installed at home. These cables hadn’t been terminated, this meant I needed to learn how to wire up the RJ45 connectors. I needed to know how RJ45 Wiring worked. I couldn’t find a guide online so I research how to do it and I’ve documented the process in this how to guide.

Table of Contents

1. The First Step
2. Equipment List
3. Step by Step RJ45 Wiring Guide
4. Summary

The First Step in our RJ45 Guide

The first step to sorting out the RJ45 wiring at your house is to make sure you have decent Ethernet cable. By decent, what I mean is atleast CAT5E cable. You can read all about the different classes of Ethernet cable online. You need to decide what you want to use the Ethernet cable for.

How to make your own CAT6 OR CAT5E Patch Cables

Have you bought 10M of CAT6 Ethernet Cable and want to turn it into patch cables? Or, like me, are you going to run 50m from your router, outside the house, up the wall, back into the house and then into the walls?

It doesn’t matter what you do or where you place your cable you’ll need to know the basics of RJ45 Wiring.

What equipment do you need?

You’ll need the following in order to get connected. I’ve added the Amazon links so you can buy them if you don’t have anything on the equipment list.

CAT5E Or CAT 6 Ethernet Cable
RJ45 Connectors
RJ45 Connector Caps
Crimp Tool
Wire Stripper

Make sure the Crimp Tool you buy has a wire cutter included as you’ll need one to trim the twisted pairs. It’s important the inner wires are all the same length.

Step By Step RJ45 Wiring Guide

1. Using your Wire Stripper tool you need to strip the cable approximately 4cm’s.
2. Now that you can see the internal twisted pairs. Spread the four pairs of wire apart.
3. Take the wire pairs and untwist them. Be careful not to untwist them below the outer cable. You need to leave as much cable twisted as possible. Make sure to neatly align as per the image below:
   

   How to Align RJ45 Wiring:

   

4. Take your Crimp Tool and cut the wires so they are; (a.) As straight as possible. (b.) The same length.  (Don’t cut them too short!)
5. Slide an RJ45 Connector Cap over the wire.

   

6. Keep the 8 wires aligned as per the photo and carefully slide into the end of one of your RJ45 Connectors. Make sure the clip is facing downwards. You also need to make sure each wire slides into the correct guide inside the connector.
7. Check the end of the RJ45 connector to make sure all of the wires are right upto the end and are still in the correct order.
8. Take your Crimp Tool and out the RJ45 Connector into it. Squeeze the crimp tool the full length of travel to make sure there is sufficient pressure to properly crimp the wires.

   

9. I didn’t use a cable tester but to make sure it works and to make sure you’ve correctly terminated both ends you can use a cable tester. A guide can be found online.

Hopefully you’ve found this RJ45 Wiring guide helpful. Please let me know if you need any further help or assistance. I’ll try and post more DIY network stuff in the future.