Wiring

a straight through category 5 cable is commonly referred to as a "patch cable." It is most commonly used to connect individual workstations to hubs/switches.

A patch cable is a cable that connect 2 devices.

The most common use, is to connect between the wall jack and the PC to be networked.

A special kind of patch cable referred to as a cross-over cable is used to connect 2 devices.

The term patch cable comes from the early days of the telephone when operators connected wires on their patch boards to connect callers.

It is also used in the audio and recording industry in equipment racks to patch (connect) signals from different effects processors and tape units.

In a network server room, patch cables may be used to interconnect the servers, and connect the switch and hub to the building network wiring.

Chas

Basically a patch cable is the network lead plugged into your nic.
If you consider a buiding, normally you would have a comms room or wiring closet were you switches/hubs etc are located. From this location you would have cat5/6 cables running to the desktop. This cable is a is terminated to a patch panel in the closet and to an outlet at the desk. This cable contains 4 pairs of wire but the metal in each wire is solid. In a patch lead the wire is braided (i.e lots of thin copper wires)
Hope this helps

Before the world started networking, large corporations had rooms full of servers, routers, ect.

Most of the servers, routers, and the room cables were terminated onto rack mounted jacks. "Patch Panels".

Instead of changing the cabling when they remodeled they would go to the "Patch Panels" and do the rerouting with a short piece of network cable "Patch Cable"

The names have migrated to the current world situations where the patch cable is any determinate length of network cable with connectors on both ends.

Hope this Helps.

Good Luck Lee

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