Tool Free Cat6 Keystone Jack VCELINK

These keystone jacks have some weight to them and are very sturdy. The enclosure is rigid and it does not flex at all when handling or pressing the pieces together.

I bought these to use with 23 awg shielded cat 6 cable. The outer jacket is much thicker than other Ethernet cables I’ve used, so I was concerned that the total outer diameter of the cable would be too large for the jack to accept. Initially, I was going to terminate the cables and plug them into inline keystone couplers, but I could not find modular plugs that would accept the larger outer jacket of the cable.

Connecting the cables to this jack did not require a punch down tool, and that was great! After stripping the jacket off, I’d advise arranging the individual wires to match the configuration/order of how they will be arranged. This will help minimize the bulk and amount of overlap of the wires making it easier to connect the internal pieces.

I wish I knew about these years ago!

These worked great and were very easy to install.

Great product, Customer is very satisfied with the product.

These are heavy duty and extremely well fit for purpose.

They are a tiny bit bigger than unshielded jacks - you may have issues getting six of them into a 3x2 keystone plate, but in a 1x3 or a 2x2, I had no issues.

Make sure you understand a number of key issues to give yourself the minimum of headaches later:
- CAT5 and CAT6 require different sized RJ45s to accommodate the difference in wire gauge of the conductors
- get yourself a good cable stripper instead of a knife to trim off shielding and sheathing. It will save you time and money later when you have weird inconsistencies in your video or networking issues.
- if you aren't familiar, look at how to properly terminate shielded CAT cable:
- how to deal with the shield, the screen,
- use RJ45s designed for shielded cable
- be VERY careful when trimming the central plastic spline so as to not nick a conductor
- when stripping shielding and rearranging your ends also take care not to nick anything, whether with cutters or with a fingernail (I've seen issues with HDbaseT video over CAT5e with someone who was causing little nicks in the conductors with a fingernail when then were pressing the conductors down into the punchdown channels of the jack.

That's most of it. A good cable tester will also save you a LOT of time, blood, sweat and tears post-install. The best $1000 I spent when starting my business in 2008 was on a Fluke CableIQ cable qualification tool, which I purchased used, but in as new condition. This will do 99% of what a cable certification tester will do, costing four to eight times as much. You might find one for as little as $500 now, but it will tell you cable length, pair length, will test up to gigabit speeds, as well as doing other miscellaneous (and very useful) things like providing a test tone for speaker cable.

My install isn't yet live, but my terminations all tested good, first time round, so I think these work fine. I will update if there are any issues once I've got HDR 4K running across HDbaseT baluns!

installed complete, haven't test the connection yet, but they are really high end just by looking at them