RJ45 Splitter??? Will this work?

[Titan]

I used to do wiring for a little over two years, and we tried that idea several times, mostly due to the customer trying to save a nickel. If only one machine will be on at a time, it will work, if not, you will experience corrupted data packets, hence, a much slower network connection for those stations because the data has to get sent more times. From experience, I'd say add another line, or, if you are using 4 pr. cat. 5, you can use the two unused pair for the other jack, just substitute the unused pair.

[sjs74]

Hmmm...I don't think the RJ-45 splitters you saw are what you are thinking of. They do just what they say, they split the 8 wires of an RJ-45 into two RJ-45's with 4 wires each. You would use 1 of these at your drop, and 1 at your punchdown, and you have effectively doubled the wiring in your wall. They don't actually share the connection, and you have to install it on both ends. As long as it is rated Cat5 then I guess they should work fine, I've never actually tried one.

[smunzli]

if you are spliting out the four pairs to 2 jacks, yes that will work, but it does not follow BICSI standards. if you are try to split two pair to 2 jacks forget it. computers are not phones.

[frogpuff]

Has anyone ever seen or used a RJ45 splitter to share a network jack? I want to have 2 pc's share one network wall jack. I guess my question is would this work or would there be network errors when receiving data packets back from the network. Thanks!

[toms111]

Another often overlooked solution is to purchase a small (4 port) hub with an uplink port. These have gotten very cheap. You can then connect the wall connection to the hub and be able to connect the two computers to the hub.

[frogpuff]

Yes toms111, that is going to be my solution, I have a lynksys 5 port hub that was damaged by a lightning strike last year. Two of the ports fried, but 3 of the ports work just fine and should solve my problem. Thanks to everyone for their thoughts.