My house was hardwired for Ethernet by the builder. (We didn't buy from the builder.) I have outlets in most rooms. All are neatly labeled. Data 1, Data 3, Data 3, etc. the corresponding ends are in the room with the cable box/router. Fantastic! Connecting an outlet should be super simple!

WRONG.

Every single outlet in this house is labeled incorrectly. I just plugged in 10 or more of these to the router while my son refreshed a webpage until we found the right one.

Granted, it still only took about 10 minutes, but the labels were there for a reason… how hard would it have been to label them correctly?

That stinks - sorry to hear it. If you want to get it all straight, you can buy a tester on Amazon for fairly cheap that will make mapping these much easier.

At least your cat 5/6 was done right. In our old house that we built, I tried the whole hook it up to every one to see which one was which thing, and couldn't get any of them to work. Called my buddy who is a computer engineer, and he came down with his tester to see what the problem was, and he couldn't get any to work either. He began looking at it and they wired the male ends wrong, so it would never work. He ended up just snipping all of them off and starting over from scratch.

That's pretty crappy.

Next to each CAT 5/6 outlet is a "phone" outlet (all on the same plate) and those are just more CAT 5/6. So when needed a phone line I had to pay to get that out in.

What are the testers called? It would be handy to have one.

Not sure if this is a good one or not, but this looks like what he used. It was 10 years ago, so hard to remember exactly.

https://www.amazon.com/Paladin-Tools-PA1574-Cable-Check/dp/B085JTGK6W/ref=sr_1_5?crid=2NIE6VENYOWTG&keywords=cat+5+tester&qid=1678980574&sprefix=cat+5+t%2Caps%2C473&sr=8-5

This is one of the reasons I told the contractor not to do the terminations. I trust myself for this. Now that I've seen some of their handiwork, I Damon glad I did it myself

Get one of the tools linked about and save yourself MASSIVE time and headaches.

You are relying on whomever put the connectors and keystones on your cables to have done them correctly.

Our house is just over 10 years old and I have found several in the 3 years we have been here that were simply wired incorrectly.

Another example of where a proper tool saves your brain, your wallet and your time.

My parents house they stripped the CAT5 back in the master closest (where we had a central data box for cable, phone, and network) and twisted all the common cold together...