How to repair a break in a long Cat-5e cable run

Question

I have a long run of Cat5e which is broken at about 20' from one end. Replacing the entire cable isn't an option, as it's fairly long and is going through walls and such.

Searching this on google produced nothing but silly results, one of which recommended a splice box, but I'm concerned about signal attenuation, as well as the voltage from the POE.

My thoughts were to re-run a cable from the shorter end (again, about 20') and terminate the ends.

Is there a best practice for how they should connect? Should they be terminated as male ends and connected using a female-to-female coupler? or as female ends and connected using a short patch cable?

Answer 1

Anything you choose to do will increase attenuation and potentially shorten the distance you can run PoE.

There is no best practice answer to this as the best practice is to re-run the cable. Since you can't (or aren't willing to do this) then I would do one of two things, although I would still highly recommend running a new cable (you can use the old cable to pull the new cable through walls, etc).

1. Use a quality mechanical splice solution maintaining the characteristics of the cable as much as possible (i.e. don't untwist or remove more jacket than needed). This may include the splice box you found or may simply be the use of IDC splice connectors (although these are more of a voice solution).
2. Run a 20-30' cable to the break. Terminate one side to a surface mount jack and the other to a male end. This still increases the terminations by two but will eliminate the coupler.

No matter what you choose to do, after you are done make sure you re-certify the cable with a tester to make sure it meets your standard (Cat5E from your post).