smurfomatic

@localzuk - the "near" end is a HP Procurve 2600, and the far end has been tried with an old 10MB hub and a Belkin F5D7231 wireless point/switch. @m25man - haven't tried packet analysing, but as I've said nothing changed hardware-wise from the time it worked to when it stopped. This was why I'd assumed it was a faulty cable. It is solid core, but it would be strange to have the second cable break immediately on installation. @Willott - nothing has changed in the area. The cable spans across the poles with one telephone cable - the phone still works fine (in fact it rang while I was in the office today!)

I'd thoughht along similar lines, however I can't understand why this problem only occurred after several months of error-free connection. Any ideas how much a fibre link would cost?

First post here - sorry if these questions are answered elsewhere, but I'm quie busy and haven't had time to search. Having had problems with network traffic I recently bought an Ethernet extender to cure the problem, but it hasn't worked. Let me explain. We have two buildings connected (over telegraph poles) by approx 80 metre length of external grade CAT5, which worked fine for some months. At some point over Christmas, the connection dropped out and there was massive (approx 30%) packet loss. We put in another length of cable with the same problems. I was hoping the Ethernet extender would boost the signal enough to cure the packet loss but it doesn’t seem to work. Plugging in to different sockets on the POE switch at the “near” end makes no difference. The strange thing is, if you plug a laptop directly into the “far” end of the cable, it works fine (though it handshakes down to 10MB). However, if you attach it to a hub/switch the connection is lost (computers won’t be issued IP addresses, and if you used fixed IP there’s no traffic back). I’m completely at a dead end regarding solutions – I can’t think of anything else to try. The likelihood of having two damaged pieces of cable is minimal, but I can’t run a third attempt without buying another drum – which would be good money after bad at this point. Suggestions would be welcome!