Cisco's Mutilated Cables
I installed another pair of Linksys PLE200 Powerline netwoking adapters for Carol's sister a few days ago, and again (as I described in my entries for June 2-4, 2007) they worked right out of the box, in spite of the illiterate documentation and the moronically coded management utility. What is worthy of note this time (I overlooked it the first time) is the state of the two CAT5 patch cables included with the ~$200 PLK200 Powerline networking kit. Basically, they're mutilated.
One of the two patch cables is shown above. I hope everybody knows what's wrong here: You can't just hank up a CAT5 cable like it was a power cord and still call it a CAT5 cable with a straight face. Making tight 180° bends in the cable kinks the copper conductors and inserts impedence bumps-think of them as electron turbulence-at the kinks. This causes packet errors and hugely reduces the continuous bit rate at which the cable can operate.
It's worse yet when you consider that the PLE200 unit itself is designed to carry HD video over IP, and it thus asks a lot of its cables. If you intend to move video over your network, you should ideally use the newer, higher-bandwidth CAT5E cables, and keep the radius in any cable bends as broad as possible. I watched the guy who installed CAT5E throughout our house in 2003, and he was an artist: The cables turn gently wherever they turn, at radii that in many cases was 24" or more. (This is much easier to do when you can place cables before the drywall goes up!)
I've always liked Linksys gear, but my experiences recently have not been as good as they were three or four years ago. Cisco has since bought Linksys, and it boggles the mind to think that Cisco could be behind the kinds of carelessness I've seen in products I've installed over the last year or so. One hopes it's a coincidence-and next time I may try another vendor.