"Most of us, if we do not deal in high-speed digital signalling, have a kind of "DC Circuits" understanding of wiring where the most important thing is simply that the wires connect the right points together."
An example of this is thinking that the order of wires in your crimps doesn't matter so long as it is consistent at both ends. This is emphatically not the case! Each twisted pair in a cat5 cable is intended to carry a signal and it's inverse. If you add a signal to it's inverse you should get nothing, but if noise has skewed both signal and inverse, the result of addition will be the isolated interference you need to subtract from your signal. Cat5 connections rely on this noise cancellation to work, as the wires used have little or no shielding. If you put wires into the wrong order so that signals are not paired with their inverses, this noise cancellation system is totally fubar'd and will likely make things worse than if there was no noise cancellation at all. It might work over a few meters, but longer cables are almost guaranteed to fail.
Pick a wiring standard (568-A or 568-B) and stick to it. If you do this, it's pretty hard to mess up anything else so badly that your cables won't work. Bluejeanscables is a cable manufacturer, so they're probably exaggerating how hard it is to make a good cable. In particular, their "buy american" schtick is not very applicable to cabling. Monoprice is functionally equivalent, even if it's from China.
Note: If you're wiring your home, be sure to use plenum grade cable. Other cables may be flammable and fire codes tend to disapprove of having flammable cords running through your home.
Also Note: I am not an electrician. I just found out the hard way by making bad cables for my home. If you buy one $50 spool of cable, $5 of terminations, and a $20 crimp tool you'll never have to pay for network cables again. I'm not sure if it would be worth it now, but it certainly was 10 years ago!
I'm not an electrician but have installed around 10 million feet of low voltage wire under one in a previous job.
Plenum cabling is typically only required when the cabling is in a space open to the air (e.g., a t-bar grid ceiling with HVAC cold air returns in it). If sealed behind sheetrock or something else you can use the standard stuff, which is less expensive.
Also, almost as important as the proper ordering of the individual strands is preserving as much as the twisting as possible. Hard kinks in the wire and stripping too much at the termination ends can affect that.
Running too near other wiring can severely affect the noise as well. If you need to cross it, perpendicular is the best.
And lastly, be aware of the maximum rated length for the wiring when doing long runs. It can only reliably carry the signal so far.
> Bluejeanscables is a cable manufacturer, so they're probably exaggerating how hard it is to make a good cable. In particular, their "buy american" schtick is not very applicable to cabling. Monoprice is functionally equivalent, even if it's from China.
This. The article has some very decent and scientifically valid advice regarding terminations, and they unnecessarily throw in this protectionist voodoo about Chinese cable being "almost always terrible" (with an American jobs reference to boot), without backing up their assertions with tests of cables. This makes me somewhat mistrustful of the rest of their article, for no good reason.
So, given the context they may have actual conclusions they reached about Chinese made cables.*
I have had alot of experience in the recent few years with Chinese made wire, and I am unsurprised when it comes out bad. The most common issue I have had is buying a particular gauge and getting something smaller, but marked as the gauge I'm expecting, ex: buying 22awg and getting 24awg.
I don't have much recent experience with network cables being bad, mainly because I only use cables from 3 manufacturers (Belkin, Carlisle Interconnect and Ortronics). But my takeaway from the world of patchcables is that alot are more flakey than people really notice.
* The problem with the phrase "Chinese made" and its like is that between two things made in China you might see wildly different quality. The real thing that drives how well something is made is the quality standards the goods are expected to meet. Typically the case with bad Chinese made goods is that the quality was not met, either it was not expected, it was not tested or not enough pressure was put on the manufacturer to meet the standards.
What the previous test BJC did mainly reveals is that cables are not being tested to meet the standards they are expected to meet. A number of factors are probably contributing to this, such as the industry not really caring to test cables and the price points driving down QA expectations.
To add to the whole Chinese made issue is that factory scrap and seconds is often resold as product. This is stuff that failed QA and should have been torn down to be disposed of but is instead either sold as is or refurbished on a second shift.
I work as an electrical engineer on military aircraft.
High speed cabling is susceptible to all sorts of nasty "gremlins". I work with copper fibre channel runs, RF and long 1394 runs regularly. I am still preaching the gospel to other technicians and engineers that ringing this cabling out with a multimeter is NOT enough to guarantee that the signaling will get through! This article is the perfect demonstration of this. Those terminations would have rung through using a multimeter, which is just sending a very tiny DC signal, but the TDR analysis showed poor terminations. I have encountered the exact same scenario in my own work.
I worked as an intern at a company installing (then) 100BaseT and FDDI cabling in industrial installations and also office buildings 20 years ago. For every network socket installed, the customer got the (thermal-paper-)printout of a network cable tester.
I'd expect this to be the minimum level of diligence when installing cables on a military aircraft, or shouldn't I? ;-)
I had no idea there were even 2 wiring standards. Only found out last year when trying to connect via an older cat5 cable that was going from my garage to the office at my house.
And after reading your comment also realized it is probablhy not up to code as well...
You actually require both wiring standards to create a cross-over cable.
The tricky bit I've found (and I also used a Fluke tester on all cables I manually terminated) is that when terminating cat-6 cables, the inner two pairs had to be separated and terminated perfectly symmetrically. With cat-5, or 5e, you seem to be able to get away with some sloppiness, but with cat-6 you need to think like a seamstress. Those wires need to be exactly in place, and exactly the right length.
I used to find cable termination quite a zen-like experience. I'd do a hundred cable terminations, then fifty cable tests, and very rarely get to smile at a perfect result.
Wait. I didn't know this. They send inverse signals? Really? Does that mean that long cat-5 cables made with the wrong standard wont work on some equipment?!
You are mentioning two things. 1) yes, they send send signals, and their "inverse" over a pair of cables. That's guaranteed by the use of transformers on your network card/network switch. Current that the transformer sends in one line of a pair, has to be returned in the other pair.
On an old 10MBit or 100MBit/s card (10BaseT, 100BaseT) on each device there will be one pair to send data out, and one to receive data. This uses up 4 pins on your RJ45 connector, the other 2 are unused. The pair that is used on your network card to send out data are pins 1 and 2. The pair that is used on your network card to receive data is on pins 3 and 6.
The 2nd thing you mention are the two standards TIA/EIA-568 assigns colors to pins, and they have a version A and B where the colours of pair 1/2 and pair 3/6 are swapped.
Hence, when you have a cable where one side is wired according to "A" and the other is wired according to "B" you have something that, in the old days, was called a cross-cable, which you could use to directly connecto two computers with each other, without having a hub or switch in between. Which is very useful, especially if you'd connect e.g. two switches in two buildings with each other.
But because miswirings regarding the two color schemes were so frequent, and connecting routers/switches/computers directly using "straight" cables was so convenient, most devices manufactured after the 90s can swap these pairs internally automatically. Hence no matter if you have a strait or cross-cable, or a miswired 568A/B installation computers will just function fine.
With 1000BaseT (Gigabit-Ethernet) data is transmitted and received on all pairs simultaneously, and also this miswiring is automatically detected and taken into account.
There are two standards, you can pick either it doesn't matter. You use the same pattern of colors on both sides. (The colors different between the standards, but the difference is cosmetic, not electrical.)
That means pin 1 is the same on both sides, the devices using this cable have to be different, like a network card on one side and a switch on the other. Internally the two devices have opposite meaning of what wire is receive and transmit.
Or you can use one standard on one end, and the other standard on the other. This makes a crossover cable, where the receive and transmit pairs are swapped.
This is good when connecting two devices that both have the same belief about which pin is receive and transmit.
These days people got tired of dealing with that and most devices auto negotiate which pin is which, and the type of cable doesn't matter.
Ethernet uses differential signaling, a pair of wires transmits the positive and negative sides of the signal. When interference hits the twisted pair, it affects both signals the same way, and the effect is cancelled out.
If you try to use two wires from different pairs for one signal, you lose this property because now the wires are further apart, and possibly worse, twisted with another signal.
Off topic, but I can't resist re-posting the following. It will bring tears of joy to anyone who hates patent trolls.
Blue Jeans Cable was mentioned on HN a few months ago in the context of Monster Cable sending them a letter threatening to sue them for patent and trademark infringement. An HN poster characterized their response letter to Monster Cable as: "That. letter. is. glorious."
Here are just a few snippets:
if you file on this sort of basis, you are in
Rule 11 frivolous-claim territory
...
You are required, as a matter of legal ethics,
to display good faith and professional candor
in your dealings with adverse parties, and you
have fallen miserably short of your ethical
responsibilities
...
Read the patents narrowly, and Monster loses;
read them broadly, and Monster loses.
...
I spent nineteen years in litigation practice
...
I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense
of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with
litigation against me I will pursue the same
merits-driven approach: I do not compromise with
bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand
dollars on defense than give you a dollar of
unmerited settlement funds.
...
Not only am I unintimidated by litigation;
I sometimes rather miss it.
But it's a mistake to assume that just because network signals are electrical, any electrician is automatically qualified to put a network together.
This can't be stressed enough, especially when running horizontal cabling through buildings. We've had issues in taking ownership of network infrastructure that was installed by "reliable" electricians.
Some advice: Make sure that you keep a decent bend radius on the connections and that you're able to sustain (near) peak transfer over the connection. Cable testers and certifiers add to the confidence that you've got a solid connection. Modern switches will also report on CRC errors and issues that come from physical layer problems.
I once worked in an optics lab that had been really well planned. Each bench had network connections and optical fiber connections that go to each bench in each room of the lab. The idea was that you could build something in one room and send it's output to another room just by using the right fiber port on your bench. No need to string fiber optics along the floor and through doors!
Planning was undone by execution unfortunately. The installers claimed they had worked with fiber optics before and could do a great job. They installed the cat5 cables with such tight turns that only half of them work. The fiber optic cables had the same tight turns, and fiber is more sensitive to bends. The loss between benches just 4 meters apart is in excess of 30 dB! Totally unusable for practically all experiments.
Having diagnostics on the switch can be a big plus. I wired a long run, partly underground, myself, and it was erratic. I had two parallel cat5e lines, and I could only use one.
After I got the better switch, it was able to tell me approximately how far along the cable the fault was, which was enough to narrow down the problem. I checked bend radius and re-terminated, and problem solved.
So nice to work with good equipment. It turns voodoo into engineering.
I just terminated a ton of CAT5e for security cameras and I can definitely see the margin of error begin high. It sucks to do, I feel like there should be an easier way to terminate them that doesn't involve carefully trying to align the right color combination and holding them steady enough to then align them in that same order with tiny slots on the plug.
Yes, the correct solution is structured cabling with punchdown jacks, punchdown patch panels, and commercially manufactured and certified patch and lobe cords. No one is going to pay commercial electrician rates, even lv, to futz around with a crimper, especially when one little plastic tab getting snapped off means a cable needs to be re terminated.
I have done a lot of punchdown jack connections, and a few crimp connections, and I have to agree that the punchdown connections (into a female jack which receives a patch cord, and the patch cord goes to the device) have been much more deterministic. It is rare when one does not work the first time.
I wasn't using structured cabling, just ordinary Cat5e cable.
But I think for a security camera, as in the parent comment, which may be getting PoE, the tidiest connection would use a crimp-down male RJ45. I would not enjoy being up on a ladder fussing with a crimping tool and 8 stubby wires.
Still better to put a jack (facing down!) into a surface mount box and patch into the camera. When you are working with outdoor gear, put the surface mount box into a waterproof jbox. Even if you are going into gear with a gasket that requires you to crimp an end on a patch cable, it's still better to do it this way. Jack-to-jack lasts so much longer and is so much more reliable, I will almost never allow crimped ends anywhere in my networks. Patch cables are a commodity, horizontal runs are an investment.
Another tip: Don't try to mix cat5 and 6 wire and connectors. The cat6 wire is larger, won't fit in the connectors for cat5, and the pins won't puncture the thicker insulation.
Another article on the same site (Blue Jeans Cable) makes the interesting point that some kinds of cable are more expensive not because they are better at reducing signal loss but because they are rated for more fire-resistance for certain kinds of installations.[1] The article points out that more expensive is not always better if by "better" you mean "less likely to distort the signal."
I've crimped some RJ45s for my own house, but always got wrong, and have to crimp 3 or more times to make it work (cut off connectors at both side, and re-crimp again). Any tips on it?
I rarely crimp cable anymore, but having a quality crimp tool makes a world of difference. I picked-up an Amp crimp tool secondhand for under $50. The tool is precisely built, very durable, and produces repeatable results. It's very frustrating to have a termination ruined by a poorly-made crimper.
Practice is the only way to get really good at it. I did several thousand RJ-45 terminations and a similar number of punches into 110-style jacks back in the late 90's, early 2000's. After you've done enough muscle-memory kicks-in and you get consistent, good results. If you just need a few crimps purchase pre-made certified patch cables and you'll save time (money) and frustration.
IANACT, but over the years this is the system I have developed and it has worked well for me:
- if nothing else, buy a cheap crimping kit on amazon that includes a cable tester and basic crimper.
- invest in good patch cable. the cheap stuff is much harder to work with and you'll realize the dollar you saved wasn't worth it. I've noticed the boxes (e.g., 1000ft) seem of much better quality than short length patch cables that you re-purpose. $80 for a 1000ft that will last for many years has been a good investment for me.
- cut off an inch or more of outer cable jacket
- cut off that annoying fiber string
- before you untwist the pairs, spread them wide apart in the order they'll line up: when looking at the clip side of the plug, it will normally be Brown, Green, Blue, Orange. I've memorized this order because it's the order of colors going from ground to sky (brown ground, green grass, blue sky, orange sun).
- now untwist the pairs, solid color goes on the left, striped color on the right.
- green striped wire is the exception that gets separated from its pair; move it between the blue and orange wires.
- hold the well-ordered wires tightly between your thumb and index finger and use a rocking side-to-side and back-and-forth motion to bend and comport with its final positioning. This lessens the chance it will mis-align when inserted into the plug.
- Use scissors or some other tool to clip the wire ends so they are of equal length and can extend inside the plug completely. after years of practice this has ended up being the length of my thumbnail, which is convenient since that's where I'm holding the wire as I cut.
- Put wiring into plug and view that wires enter their correct slot. Be sure to enter via clip side facing you (as that's how wires were oriented above. I prefer the clip side because it's easier to see that wires are entering properly.)
- Push cable jacket snugly into plug and rock back and forth to ensure wiring enters full length. Cable jacket should be well inside the plug past the crimp wedge.
- Crimp!
- Check that contacts have all been seated properly. As the crimper gets older it will have a tendency not to seat the contacts properly. This is a sign that it's time to invest in a new $10 crimper.
- Check that opening side of plug has wedged on top of cable jacket and not the wiring. Cable jacket should not be separable from the plug. If you don't do this, over time the jacket will separate from the plug and the wiring will eventually fail.
- When both ends are crimped check with the cable tester.
Add in there to make sure the crimp bar falls on the outer cable jacket. If it falls on the individual wires, the strain relief will be terrible and the crimp will likely be loose.
Make sure you are using solid wire cable with solid wire connectors, or stranded wire cable with stranded wire connectors. They are quite different.
I used to make a lot of Ethernet cables, but pretty much stopped when I went to Cat 6. Beyond that, you need to be careful to remain consistent 568B or 568A, etc., and it gets messy. Almost all 10GE I've ever used has been fiber, though.
Almost had a physical altercation with someone who wired a building straight through vs correctly. Amazingly you could still get a 10M link on longer runs, or a 100M link on patches.
Correctly crimping RJ45 is one of those things that seems impossible, but once you get the hang of it works out most of the time.
- Make sure your wires are extending far enough into the plug, you should see the wire fully overlap the brass spades.
- Confirm you have the right wire layout by looking through the plug before you crimp the cable.
- As mentioned in the article, the tail part of the connector is meant to cover the tip of the cable's insulation to provide a bit of stress relief, make sure it's not too short.
Does anyone know of affordable cable testing equipment? I.e. not the ones with 8 leds that just test whether there's a connection, but one that actually measures the performance? Fluke is way expensive, I imagine there must be cheaper products that don't provide all the features and build quality of Fluke but that will still give poor old me who only wires his own house and home office some assurance that I didn't screw up completely?
A Gigabit Ethernet PHY has to do quite some signal processing (line equalization) for its normal function. And there are a few chipsets that allow you to inspect the link parameters in quite some detail. For example, have a look here for screenshots of the broadcom advanced control suite.
The link has to run in 1000BaseT-Mode to make the tools show any meaningful output, so have a known-good switch connected to the "other" side. I had used them in a distant past (must have been 10 years ago or so) to find the "best" links in an otherwise messed up building installation that could be reliabily be used for higher transmission speeds.
It's of course much less information that what you'd get from a proper ethernet cable analyzer, but much, much more than what a simple "yes, I can ping the other side" can give you.
Probably the most affordable way to get some confidence is to connect two computers at either end of the cable and do a transfer speed test using iperf or something like that. If you are using random unmatched computers, do a "control" test with a short, high-quality patch cord between them to get a baseline performance measurement.
I never had any trouble; maybe you're using poor-quality cabling, or a lousy crimper. Do you happen to have one of these bad cables lying around? A close-up photo of the end might reveal something.
Absolutely fascinating. I've been crimping my own RJ45s for a while now, surprised that I'm not quite getting the speed I'd hoped for with CAT6. Lesson learned. Thanks!
I don't find this article particularly convincing; in fact it feels suspiciously to me like the same sort of technical arguments made by some "premium audiophile cable" vendors. The fact that your fancy test equipment can detect significant differences between your cables and others' is not necessarily correlated with how well they actually work in practice. This doesn't look like one of those truly insane companies who sell $1500/m cables to a niche audience, but they're using some of the same techniques...
The fact that differences can be seen in the analogue domain is also not a direct correspondence to how the cable will perform digitally. Ethernet is digital, and as long as the signals pass the thresholds at the receiver, there will be no difference.
The most unusual thing here is that they didn't mention at all whether they actually solved any of the problems the customer originally had, which would be the true validator of their theory. (If they did, wouldn't it be a great thing to mention?) "Network performance issues" are vague - I was expecting to see tests of throughput/packet loss between the original and reterminated cables.
I hate downvotes. I usually upvote when I think someone has been unfairly downvoted. I veryrarely downvote, and yet I was one of your downvoters.
It's clear that you're "ignorant" of the black magic involved in high speed communication. I felt that your post amounted to "I don't understand this stuff ... therefore it is probably a scam".
As others have pointed out to you, at high enough speeds things become very analog instead of digital. You can literally fit entire Ethernet packets into a twisted pair cable. Packets can be short enough that they exist completely "in the wire". That's a lot different than what a "premium audiophile cable" does.
If you ever want to learn just how much "black magic" there is, read Howard Johnson's books.[1] The information is somewhat dated, nowadays things are even weirder.
It's clear that you're "ignorant" of the black magic involved in high speed communication. I felt that your post amounted to "I don't understand this stuff ... therefore it is probably a scam".
"ignorant"? That's really jumping to conclusions...
I've worked with DDR, DDR2, PCI, PCIe, and USB (2.0 only, but that's still 480MHz), in mass-produced designs. Also some proprietary busses operating in the 600-800MHz range. It doesn't have to be perfect. That is what is so great about digital signaling.
My post is more of a "I know from experience how much you can get away with, and fancy test equipment that can tell the difference does not always reflect how something performs in practice."
On the other hand, I won't comment on high-frequency true analogue stuff like microwave/RF.
It is a bit funny that your verdict is that someone is "ignorant" of the black magic in high speed communication, and you're linking to someone who literally has called two of his books "Black Magic".
Now I don't happen to agree with 'userbinator's skepticism -- indeed I think that a lot of engineers who work with digital stuff tend to forget that it is analog under the hood, with all the associated crosstalk and BER problems. But creating this atmosphere of "Ooooooh, it is something you probably don't understand" isn't very productive, if you know what I mean. I wish Johnson had titled his books, "High-Speed Digital Design: Quite Simple If You Do the Math and Physics".
I see the point that you and 'uberbinator' were making; "ignorant" was a poor choice of words on my part.
I intentionally used the words "black magic" because I was going to link to Johnson's books. While Johnson's publisher (not Johnson) probably named the books, I like the titles. The words you suggest may be more appropriate but the actual titles are definitely "catchier".
You'd be surprised at just how analog high speed digital is. The data represented by the signal is digital, but the signal over the wire is an analog waveform more complicated than simple high and low voltages. Poor cables can absolutely cause high BER and lower performance. If you've ever watched digital television over the air and seen the picture drop out, it's a similar thing.
A lot of the audiophile nonsense is only nonsense in its application to the ridiculously low frequency world of audio. But when we're dealing with transmission lines, yes, cables absolutely do matter.
The data represented by the signal is digital, but the signal over the wire is an analog waveform more complicated than simple high and low voltages.
I agree, but as long as the receiver interprets the values correctly (i.e. the 1 is above its threshold, and the 0 is below its threshold) it doesn't matter. Among other things I've watched what signals like USB 2.0 HS really look like on an oscilloscope, so I'm well aware that they don't look anything like the nicely-drawn diagrams in textbooks.
Poor cables can absolutely cause high BER and lower performance.
But was that the case here? They identified a cable that had sub-par signal characteristics, and without looking at the actual effects it had on network performance, made the premature conclusion that it was. We don't know whether or not it was really the cause of the customer's problem (imagine them getting back this nicely terminated cable and seeing that it has the same performance... I would not be surprised.)
> without looking at the actual effects it had on network performance, made the premature conclusion
They didn't need to look at the "actual effects".
The very smart engineers who created the high speed Ethernet standards have already studied the "actual effects". They spent years designing, studying, analyzing, and characterizing.
The designers distilled their efforts into some simpler rules such as "near end crosstalk (NEXT) shall not exceed ...".
Those simpler rules allowed a company like Fluke to build a test instrument that checks for things like crosstalk and delay skew and report PASS and FAIL and even report how far off the cable was from meeting the requirements.
That's all there is to it. It's ludicrous to ask for an ab initio analysis of every network problem that could be possibly encountered.
It may eventually be necessary to study "actual effects" in a particular network, but only after dispensing with low hanging fruit such as poorly terminated cables.
There is also the long term labor costs of breaking what amounts to a standard API.
Perhaps this mfgr card will work on a almost-but-not-quite cat5 cable run, but that new one won't, or that other one only works half the time, and slowly, or that one won't work when that other fluorescent light is on. The labor cost of this kind of troubleshooting can be pretty spectacular compared to a cheap and simple "must conform to cat-5 minimum standards".
Its rather like AC line voltage. True, some stuff, sometimes, will work at 100 volts or 150 volts, but I'd call an electrician and get it fixed before you spend a lifetime troubleshooting individual things that won't work reliably and consistently at 100 or 150 volts.
> [Blue Jeans Cable] identified a cable that had sub-par signal characteristics, and without looking at the actual effects it had on network performance made the premature conclusion that it was.
From the fine article:
"[Our customer is] dealing with network performance issues at a small company, and has come to suspect that bad patch cords, made by an electrician, account for some of the problems he's seeing."
Looks like the customer who sent them the cable had already done the troubleshooting required to determine that the cable was probably bad.
Also, you should probably read: http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/channel-certified-eth... Each part in an Ethernet network has well-specified tolerances for a reason. If one part of that network causes far too much signal degradation then all sections of the network that flow through that part can fail to function.
It is similar to DSL connection issues cause by spotty telephone wiring. Cross talk and outside interference raise noises levels on the line and the devices on either end can't tell the signal from the background noise. This is different from audiophile cabling, which is usually over short distances where noise is not an issue.
The difference between analogue and digital in signalling is that with digital, if the signal integrity through a cable reaches a certain threshold, then you achieve perfect transmission of whatever protocol you are sending. Where this threshold is depends on how much bandwidth the protocol uses.
This does not mean that all digital cables are fine then - with very long, low quality and/or improperly terminated network cables, you tend to see higher packet loss, sometimes you see dropouts, and sometimes the equipment negotiates to a lower speed. This kind of thing has a lot to do with what's happening in the analogue domain, because interference and signal integrity problems interferes with decoding the analogue signal back into the digital data, so you have packets that fail the checksum validation because they have been corrupted mid-flight.
The problem is that what we send down cables aren't nice sharp square-edged waveforms. If you decompose a square-edge digital waveform into its Fourier series, you'll find that it takes roughly 10x the fundamental frequency of the digital rate to decently represent the signal -- so a 1 Gbit/s digital signal would take 10 GHz of analog bandwidth. Naturally this is a big waste from a Shannon-Nyquist perspective, so in practice what gets sent aren't nice sharp transitions, but rather curvy ones without so much high-frequency content.
It's still true that there are voltage thresholds at the receiver, but for high-speed digital comms there are now _time_ thresholds. In a transmission line, discontinuities cause partial signal reflections that can show up at the receiver to mess up your day. A more intuitive way to show cable quality is the eye diagram, which tells you if the threshold and timing requirements are being violated.
Edit: But this is getting away from the point of the article, which is that bad terminations cause crosstalk. There's nothing mystical about cables failing ISO specs for crosstalk. I agree with you though that some before/after packet loss numbers would've strengthened their case.
An example of this is thinking that the order of wires in your crimps doesn't matter so long as it is consistent at both ends. This is emphatically not the case! Each twisted pair in a cat5 cable is intended to carry a signal and it's inverse. If you add a signal to it's inverse you should get nothing, but if noise has skewed both signal and inverse, the result of addition will be the isolated interference you need to subtract from your signal. Cat5 connections rely on this noise cancellation to work, as the wires used have little or no shielding. If you put wires into the wrong order so that signals are not paired with their inverses, this noise cancellation system is totally fubar'd and will likely make things worse than if there was no noise cancellation at all. It might work over a few meters, but longer cables are almost guaranteed to fail.
Pick a wiring standard (568-A or 568-B) and stick to it. If you do this, it's pretty hard to mess up anything else so badly that your cables won't work. Bluejeanscables is a cable manufacturer, so they're probably exaggerating how hard it is to make a good cable. In particular, their "buy american" schtick is not very applicable to cabling. Monoprice is functionally equivalent, even if it's from China.
Note: If you're wiring your home, be sure to use plenum grade cable. Other cables may be flammable and fire codes tend to disapprove of having flammable cords running through your home.
Also Note: I am not an electrician. I just found out the hard way by making bad cables for my home. If you buy one $50 spool of cable, $5 of terminations, and a $20 crimp tool you'll never have to pay for network cables again. I'm not sure if it would be worth it now, but it certainly was 10 years ago!