[swingline-747]

Been There, Done That, Bought The T-Shirt.

Solid core is generally for premise wiring (PVC jacketed in walls, PTFE-jacketed through ducts); stranded is typically for patch cables. If you try like the first place I worked at in the mid-90's trying to put stranded ends on solid-core wire, breaking of tools and unreliable cables will make.

There's cheapo Chinese cable tester kits on eBay, AliBaba and Amazon that do a good-enough impedance at GbE spectrum testing to not have to spring for a Fluke "will-survive-nuclear-winter" "official" tester. Backfilling connectors with epoxy is another idea to avoid corrosion... as long as it doesn't affect the impedance or dielectric values much. No-snag boots, axial aligned label zipties are also a big help. Barcode label and floorplan everything.

Finally, always test every cable with iperf3 (two laptops or one laptop w two ethernet ports) and reject for reworking/replacment any cable with abnormal latency or bandwidth figures.

PS: our head-office networking guy was awesome; worked 10% time just to keep benefits since his wife was GOOG's first admin.

[slantyyz]

It might be worth mentioning that CCA (copper clad aluminum) cable which is sometimes sold with misleading descriptions in places like eBay and Amazon, is not the same as solid copper and should be avoided for power over ethernet applications.

[smolder]

Fluke is one of those used-to-be-good now-abuses-their-reputation companies anyway. They're in a mode of milking consumer trust for what it's worth until it's gone.