moves out and you want to repurpose his room to a home office) you have the flexibility to do so. It prevents you from continually moving the 'last meter' of cord, risking damage to the cable (that is, even if a patch cord fails, you can easily replace it, not so much an in-place install)Īs your use patterns change (family members moving about from room to room, say like when Jr. It allows you to flexibly move and segment different portions of your network. They aren't required, but they are wonderful to have. The only vague reasons I could find to use a patch panel was because of cable breaks, which didn't totally make sense to me since you have to have another cable anyway to go from the patch panel to the switch.Ĭan anyone give a good reason why you would or would not use a patch panel? I was planning on terminating the cable with an RJ47 plug and going straight from wall jack into the switch. I'm planning on running this cable up through the wall, into the attic, then down into a hole in the laundry room ceiling and into my gigabit switch that'll be resting on a shelf near the ceiling. I am putting 3 outlets into the house, each with a 4 jack wallplate on them (though I only have a 8 port switch so they won't all be wired up, but I don't have more than 6 devices that can even be hard wired anyway). That got me trying to figure out in what circumstances they would be useful. If your network get slower when you connect different switch, you need check your network firstly, find the main reason.So I'm getting ready to wire my house up for gigabit in the next few days, and one guide I came across mentioned a patch panel being optional. I suggest you upload the topology of network to us,I do not think you need change your switch. will I be able to unblock my ports like in my routers now to unblock settings for port numbers and reserve ip numbers and all that good stuff I can do with routers, and can I still use my existing 1 wireless router with a rackmount and keep my wireless? Any help is greatly needed? I guess my main questions are does anyone think I need to convert to rackmount switch and patch panel? So I think I need to convert over to rack mount switch and patch panel, or maybe even just a rackmount switch maybe not so much need the patch panel, I'm not gonna be doing a lot of switching with patch panel I don't think, but can add if needed. I have some equipment that needs exact ip numbers unblocked and ports opened and all that great stuff that takes forever to setup. So I have like 4 switches now and a wireless router all only have about 4 ports each on them, and just keep running out of space for network wire, and keep having to add more switches, and seems like everything is slow or getting slower everytime I add a switch in. Ok so I am new to all this rackmount switches and patch panels.

Patch panel setup