# Can anyone explain this Ethernet cable?



## kobaj (Apr 10, 2011)

So a friend gave me a belkin router to play with (apparently it has issues, surprise?) Regardless, it came with a very strange ethernet cable. Such that it only has 4 wires? Is this possible? It works fine and all, but does that mean the other 4 wires normally bundled in ethernet cable are for nothing? Or is this a reduced bandwidth cable? Or what?!

tl;dr, why is this cable so janky?!

Picture of an end below,
http://img858.imageshack.us/img858/9803/img0615qe.jpg


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## Laquer Head (Apr 10, 2011)

Yah, standard ethernet connection only uses 4 wires! 2 for sending and 2 for receiving..


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## Demilich (Apr 10, 2011)

kobaj said:


> So a friend gave me a belkin router to play with (apparently it has issues, surprise?) Regardless, it came with a very strange ethernet cable. Such that it only has 4 wires? Is this possible? It works fine and all, but does that mean the other 4 wires normally bundled in ethernet cable are for nothing? Or is this a reduced bandwidth cable? Or what?!
> 
> tl;dr, why is this cable so janky?!
> 
> ...



From what I could gather, and, from my experience, as I too own a Belkin router, that included the same wire, it's an old T based 10Mb ethernet wire, and it is basically only good for the modem to router connection, as the included ethernet wire does not allow for any speeds above 10Mbps, and does not allow for auto-negotiation. So yeah, a reduced bandwidth cable.


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## PohTayToez (Apr 12, 2011)

Demilich said:


> From what I could gather, and, from my experience, as I too own a Belkin router, that included the same wire, it's an old T based 10Mb ethernet wire, and it is basically only good for the modem to router connection, as the included ethernet wire does not allow for any speeds above 10Mbps, and does not allow for auto-negotiation. So yeah, a reduced bandwidth cable.



Both 10BASE and 100BASE Ethernet only use two wire pairs in an Ethernet cable.  The pictured cable is suitable for most uses, and would perform no differently than any other standard Ethernet cable.    1000BASE (Gigabit Ethernet) is the first widely used standard to actually require all eight wires.  Autonegotiation doesn't really have anything to do with the sort of cable used.


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