Andy Wade wrote:
John Rumm wrote:

Yup, when working with signals that are sent as a differential pair,
it is vital to make sure they are carried by a twisted pair. Just
having the right pins joined together is not enough at these frequencies.

It's also important to maintain the twisting of each pair right up as
close as possible to the IDC terminals of the socket. The 'as
installed' picture provided didn't show particularly good practice in
this respect.

Now can I ask a supplementary Ethernet question about switches while all
the networking experts are around? Can you cascade the cheap unmanaged
switches /ad-infinitum/ and maintain communication between all nodes?
For example say two ports from a typical 4-port ADSL router, R, each
feed remote 8-port switches, A & B. Each switch provides 7 ports used
to connect local network devices. In this network will a device on
switch A be able to communicate with a device on switch B, via the
switch in R?

Yes. Thats the great thing about switches. They reconstitute to digital,
and then retransmit as analogue. You will get a delay through each one,
which makes short packet traffic a bit slower though.