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Take The "That's Impossible" Challenge
Our Risk-Free Ethernet Cable Offer
Blue Jeans Cable is offering a no-risk money-back deal on an Ethernet patch cord (or, if you like, a pair of them) -- and here it is. First, a little explanation.
A few years back, we investigated the quality of Ethernet cables on the consumer market. We found that 80% of cables labeled "Cat 6" or "Cat 6a" failed the specification at their stated categories, and that more than half of those didn't even pass the much easier Cat 5e standard. That latter bit was rather alarming, as every modern network standard calls for at least a Cat 5e-compliant cable. We sourced high quality US-made cable stock and connectors, and started manufacturing our own Cat 5e, 6 and 6a cables, running every last one through a certification test to be sure that we never ship a bad cable.
When we (Kurt and Pam, owners of Blue Jeans Cable) first took a few of these home, and plugged them in to our home network, problems we'd had with slow, choppy video streaming went away. That seemed like more than we could reasonably expect, and we checked the connections with our Fluke certification tester; we found that the patch cords in our home, which had come with hubs and switches and whatnot, and which we had always assumed to be of good quality, had been very, very bad indeed. Despite good in-wall cable our connections had been failing spec badly, and this accounted for some poor streaming. Still, that conspicuous improvement in video performance seemed like a probably-atypical positive experience.
In the years since, we've had any number of reports -- from customer e-mails, from Amazon reviews, from conversations with customers over the phone -- where customers have stated that they ran an Internet speed test on their home connection, then replaced their existing patch cord from modem to router with ours, and ran the test again, resulting in a substantial increase in speed. Stick the old cable back in, speed goes down; put the new cable back in, speed goes back up. Likewise, people have told us of dramatic changes in file-transfer times (see testimonial below, for example). While there's no guarantee that this will happen in any individual case -- your existing Ethernet cable may already be performing just fine -- it's happened so often that we suspect this is no quirk. We believe that many, many patch cords deployed in homes are so badly made as to cause packet loss, slowing down access by requiring that packets be re-sent.
Here's one testimonial we received from a customer:
Hi folks,
In January I replaced most of my home Ethernet cables with BJC Cat 5e and 6 cables. My network had previously had a max throughput of about ~10Mb/s, occasionally up to 40 Mb/s, with generic cat 5 and 5e cables and gigabit NICs and switches. Using rudimentary tools (WireShark and Tamosoft Throughput Test) I wasn't able to pinpoint any obvious problems, but through a long process of elimination, finally figured the cables were the only possible remaining culprit.
After replacing most of my patch cords with your cables (and no other changes,) but still using 20-year-old Cat 5 UTP in the walls, my network speed averages >800 Mb/s for large files. This has completely transformed my home server- I can finally stream media and do nightly backups without bringing my home network to its knees. Even better, my teenagers have completely stopped their daily, bitter complaints about "laggy" online gaming (which isn't particularly bandwidth intensive,) which I had always blamed on our ISP.
BTW, I've been an IT consultant for 20+ years, so I shouldn't be amazed, but... I'm amazed.
Please keep on doing what you do!"
Swapping out a couple of cables isn't expensive. A five-foot Cat 6 Ethernet cable, built in Seattle from American parts (apart from the strain relief boot) and sold on our site currently goes for $11.25 plus shipping (and, if applicable, Washington State sales tax). That's more than you pay for the average Chinese-made Ethernet cable, for sure, but it's also not "boutique" pricing -- no thousand-dollar Ethernet cables here like you might find at some of the snake-oil vendors. And unlike that Chinese-made Ethernet cable, ours comes with a proper test report and is guaranteed to meet spec. We'd like you to give it a try.
The Offer:
We will ship you a five-foot Blue Jeans Cable Cat 6 Ethernet patch cord (our choice of color), shipping included, for $11.25 (or two of them for $22.50). It'll come by first-class mail, in a mailer which is reusable, with a return label pre-printed and enclosed. Give this cable a try; if you like, use any of the common Internet speed tests available on the web and see what speed you're getting. Swap this cable out for your modem-to-router cable (and if needed, another for the connection between your router and computer), and run the test again, and see what happens. If you see no improvement, your existing cable is working just fine, and, well, that's great; go ahead and stick the cable back in the mailer, slap the return label on, and send it back to us for a full refund. We'll eat the shipping both ways. Your total cost: a few inches of tape to reseal the mailer.
But if you ARE giving up speed to crummy patch cord quality, you'll see a difference. And if you're paying $50 a month, say, for your Internet service, we think you'll find that you're very happy to pay this much once to make it run faster.
Will it work? Do we guarantee it'll work? Heck, no. It may very well not work. You may find there's no difference. Every installation differs, and some connections are already very solid. Your cable may be up to spec already, and even if it's not, it may be that the other components in the chain are dealing with it so that it's not causing trouble. If you're not dropping packets, there's nothing to improve, and we're not going to try to persuade you otherwise. But what we DO guarantee is that if you don't want this cable, you'll be out exactly zero dollars for giving it a try.
And, frankly, you'll be doing us a favor, too. We want to know. We already know that the majority of patchcords in use aren't up to snuff, spec-wise, but we'd like to know how likely it is that, when actual rubber meets actual road, a cable swap will do you good. If you have a minute to let us know, we would love to hear from you as to how this works out.
Why is it the "That's Impossible!" Challenge?
The consumer wire and cable business is a funny one. There have been so many sellers of snake oil in this trade that it often seems as though nobody trusts good advice. When we first began selling Ethernet cables, we found that there are a lot of people who do not believe that cable quality ever makes a difference, and we found ourselves sometimes in an uncomfortable war of words with them. It's uncomfortable, in part, because we always thought WE were the "cable doesn't make a difference" people. We've always contended, as a general rule, that if a cable is up to spec, it will do as good a job as can be done. This is especially true in digital applications, where no amount of signal degradation means a darned thing unless it adds up to enough to cause digital information to be misread at the receiving end, resulting in data loss in such applications as HDMI or resending of packets in such applications as Ethernet.
And so there's no cause, for example, to spend $1000 on an Ethernet cable. There are people who sell thousand-dollar Ethernet cables, but we can't imagine why anyone would ever buy such a thing. Well, we can't imagine a good reason; we can imagine bad reasons, which is another matter entirely. But when the three-dollar cable FAILS spec, there can indeed be plenty of good reason to buy the eleven-dollar cable that passes spec, because that spec is meant to provide the minimum physical-layer standards for acceptable network performance.
Alas, the air on this subject has been a bit polluted by snake oil, and that's made some people rather dogmatic in their skepticism of claims made by cable manufacturers. They assume that if the thousand-dollar patch cord is snake oil, then the eleven-dollar one is, too, and that there is nothing on earth or in heaven that a three-dollar Chinese Ethernet cable won't handle just fine. Even when confronted with the test reports showing miserable performance of that cable well below spec, they'll tell you that it's all just ones and zeros and cable quality does not, and cannot, matter.
Some of those people, if they hear of this offer, will tell you that it's not possible that an Ethernet patch cord will improve your Internet access speed. We'll agree with that to this extent: if cable in the real world were up to spec, it should indeed not be possible. But after we've had it reported to us by customer after customer, and after we've had our own personal experiences with a few patchcord replacements changing unacceptable video streaming to smooth going, we strongly suspect that the devices in people's homes are less tolerant than most people suppose and that the phenomenon is more widespread than many might think -- and we're willing to risk eating the postage both ways for you to find out.
Terms, Conditions, Provisos, Codicils, Impedimenta, Caveats and Encumbrances:
No fancy terms and conditions here, really, except that this particular offer is available only within the reach of USPS's domestic First Class Mail service -- apologies to our brethren in Canada and elsewhere. And while we don't object in principle to the idea of this being combined with other purchases, strange consequences may result in your shopping cart if you do, so we'd suggest not trying to combine this purchase with anything else on our site.
| Order Here: | ||
|---|---|---|
| 5 foot Cat 6 Ethernet Cable -- Special Offer | 11.25 | |
| Pair of 5 foot Cat 6 Ethernet Cables -- Special Offer | 22.50 | |