English
Deutsch
Espaniol
The RJ45 connector, also referred to as Registered Jack No. 45, is a modular connector widely used in ethernet applications. RJ45 connector is also called the 8P8C (8 Position 8 Contact) connector as it has 8 equally spaced conductors used for transmission of data. RJ45 connector is the male connector of the two paired components, the other being the female RJ45 Jack. The RJ45 jack is designed so that the RJ45 connector can be plugged into it to establish the connection.
The RJ45 connector is most widely used with Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) cables. The UTP cable is a 4-pair cable with 8 wires. These 8 wires are inserted in an RJ45 plug in a standardized configuration to enable proper connectivity and transmission of data. Figure 1 shows the standard color configuration of 4-pair UTP cables.
UTP cables can be configured in two different ways:
- Straight-Through
-
Crossover
Figure 1: UTP Color Configuration for RJ45 Connector
The straight-through cable has the same configuration on both ends, whereas, in the crossover cable, the orange/white-orange cables are swapped with the green/white-green cables. The crossover configuration is used when the cable is connecting two similar equipment such as a hub with a hub or a switch with a switch.
Most of the basic networking equipment have RJ45 ports that are used to connect to end-points. Commonly, the switches are available in configurations of 8, 12, 24 and 48 RJ45 based ports. The advance level switches may also have a few optical ports as well.
Figure 2: BlueLAN TP Patch Cord
UTP patch cords with prefabricated RJ45 connectors are available readily in the market and are very useful for reliable connections in any network environment. CBO-IT offers a wide range of BlueLAN Twisted Pair Patch Cords in various colors and lengths. Figure 2 shows a BlueLAN TP patch cord.
The RJ45 connector can support network throughputs of 10Mbps, 100Mbps, 1Gbps and 10Gbps. The 10Gbps throughput is supported on Category-6 and above of the UTP cables. Supported link lengths on various speeds vary and the maximum link lengths decrease as the speed is increased.
SFP transceivers with RJ45 interface are also available and commonly referred to as BASE-T transceivers. Figure 3 shows a BlueOptics 1000BASE-T transceiver that can be used in an SFP based port to provide connectivity over the common twisted pair cables.
Figure 3: 1000BASE-T Transceiver
It is evident from the above details that the RJ45 connectors are one of the most widely used connectors in the field of computer networks. Apart from computer networks, RJ45 connectors are also used in telecommunications and other allied industries. Every corporate and enterprise network uses some sort of copper cabling that is terminated on RJ45 connector. This popularity of RJ45 connectors does not seem to fade even after the increasingly common usage of fiber optic cables.
