I am reading lots of the same comment... "Your boss doesn't know what (s)he's talking about," or worse. Perhaps the problem is that, as a tech or engineer, the "I can make that damned cable just as good as Anixter" zealot might not know as much about the overall value of a tech's time as his manager does.

As I have said before, my preference is virtually always to order custom-premade or off-the-shelf premade. This has virtually nothing to do with not knowing how to crimp up a fine cable, or a lack of understanding about the quality of a homebuilt cable, or the time necessary to do it.

Simple fact of the matter is that I pay my people to do other stuff than crimp cable. For every hour one of my staff is crimping cable, they could be doing an hour of something else, presumably requiring the skills that they were hired for.

The straight dollar value of the time spent making cables versus the cost of buying them does not take into account the relative value of cable building versus the value of, say, building out a router or firewall config (which will still be left to do even after the cable-building exercise).

It's true. Telecoms use handmade custom length cable runs created by their technicians. Telecoms use handmade cables because they pay their guys to make cables. And the value of a custom length cable in a carrier-class complex cable plant is high enough to warrant fulltime guys with that skill.

Most small to mid-size enterprises can't afford to have a network guy that is even partially dedicated to cable creation. In fact, most network operations that I have dealt with are understaffed, with no hope of being expanded out to the right headcount, and having to make cables merely puts them in a bigger resource bind than normal.

Sometimes, the manager's truly a putz. Usually, though, that perception is simply that the manager has a slightly different set of priorities than the tech/engineer.

In either case, unless you plan on getting fired or have a real good reason to think you can get your manager fired for being an idiot (which is surprisingly uncommon, something to consider), the fact remains that (s)he is still your manager, and you're going to wind up doing what (s)he wants. So, document your recommendations, in case their refusal turns out to be a critical oversight later on. At least, then, your "I told you so," will have some weight.

First, I agree with Causality on this one. The boss says buy the cables, then buy the cables. But that's not a technical issue, and really, shouldn't be argued here.

As far as the technical bit, I'll tell you what I do:

A) Argue vehemently for custom-made cabling in appropriate custom coloring. This is expensive and takes a good long while. Order extras at any length.

When that fails, or I need shorter turnaround...

B) Order closest-match premade cable. Order extras at any length.

If (and ONLY if) I need a cable RIGHT NOW...

C) I'll make a cable, or have the network guys make one or two.

In every case, the cables are tested before and after a run.

As for reliability, quality, etc... You definitely can make high quality cables manually, even with inexpensive equipment, but it requires a lot of diligence (read: time and care), or a lot of experience to get it reliably right, both of which are expensive.

If you're dealing with twenty network drops, then sure, maybe you have time to make some decent quality cables, and the overall cost impact is not going to be too high.

But, in a medium sized operation, you might be dealing with several hundred server-side connections and hundreds to thousands of desktop/office connections. At this point, the cost to build cables, even at a high rate, is going to outstrip the cost of buying (at worst) closest-fit cabling off the shelf.

There is a valid argument that datacenters and normal office cat5e/cat6 cabling is put together by hand, and homebuilt cabling shouldn't be any worse than that. There are some significant differences, though, between wiring jacks and running drops.

First, in-wall or in-rack wiring moves rarely, if ever, so degradation due to stresses on the hand-punched connections are minimal.

And second, third-party networking and cabling folks that put together office wiring and datacenter wiring en masse, do hundreds, if not thousands, of connections per job, which is to say they have a LOT of experience doing the wiring in a reasonably high-quality fashion.

This all means that, even if you're like me and have been homebrewing cables since STP ethernet made its debut, the guy doing your office punchdown is WAY more experienced than you, and can reasonably justify hand-building thousands of cables.

So, to recap: Boss wants prefab cables, boss gets prefab cables. Is it better or worse to build them? It depends.

mjc