prefer -- the one your job uses, the one you believe is industry standard, the
one you think is the One True Standard even though no-one uses it, and so on.
All I ask is that you be internally consistent.
What colour should a normal ethernet cable be?
Blue
18(51.4%)
Grey
7(20.0%)
Red
0(0.0%)
Purple
1(2.9%)
Yellow
1(2.9%)
Green
0(0.0%)
Black
2(5.7%)
Some other (consistent) colorr
0(0.0%)
No standard colour
6(17.1%)
What colour should a crossover cable be?
Blue
2(6.2%)
Grey
2(6.2%)
Red
8(25.0%)
Purple
2(6.2%)
Yellow
7(21.9%)
Green
2(6.2%)
Black
1(3.1%)
Varies
1(3.1%)
Some other (consistent) colour
3(9.4%)
No standard colour
4(12.5%)
Is there a reason that crossover cables should be that colour?
Do you have other standard cat5 cable colours (eg. serial line, temporary patch, trunking, power-over-ethernet)?
Cat 1 cable (used mostly for analog telephony, in my experience) seems to be predominately white.
At Adelphia, crossover cables given to customers with ghetto ancient cable modems were green (???).
I recently converted my home to IP telephony, so I had to whip up POE cables. Home Depot had white Cat 5 available cheaply, so I used it to make my POE cables so I could tell the difference between it and my normal grey or beige cables. Any better suggestions for POE?
Anything else outside of a machine room or network closet always strikes me first as a 'designer color'. :)
Roy G. Biv
For me, orange has always been crossover (so I don't accidentally pull the wrong cable from the big spaghetti mess of unorganized cabling shoved into the steamer trunk in the closet) and red has been DMZ (so I don't accidentally put a computer on the public internet). Every other color is fair game.
I do however have a short yellow crossover cable that has sentimental value, since aevil made it for me. :-)