Cat5e Inline Coupler, Keystone Snap-In (COU5E-90)

Most of the Cat5e cable ever installed is still in the walls, and a lot of it ends in a plug that's six inches short of where it needs to be. This Cat5e inline coupler fixes that without a crimper: a female-to-female RJ45 that snaps into any standard keystone opening in a wall plate, surface box, or patch panel and joins two RJ45-terminated cables straight through, pin for pin, with no termination. It's built like a jack rather than a splice: FR4 PCB construction, phosphor bronze contacts plated 50 microinches of gold over nickel, and a fire-retardant UL 94V-0 ABS housing with a latch that holds it in the plate. It's UL Listed and EIA/TIA compliant, the 14.5 mm body fits a crowded panel, and it comes in eight colors for color-coding a patch field. For Cat6 runs, the COU6-90 is the same coupler rated a category up.

Features

• Cat5e performance. Rated for the category through the coupler, for Fast Ethernet and Gigabit links.
• RJ45 female to female, straight through. Extends a patch cord or an RJ45-terminated Cat5e cable with no termination.
• Snaps into a keystone opening. Fits a wall plate, surface box, or patch panel, with a latch that holds it in.
• Gold over nickel contacts. Phosphor bronze with a minimum 3 mm contact area and 50 µin gold.
• Fire-retardant housing and PCB. ABS and FR4, both UL 94V-0; slim form factor for high-density installations.
• UL Listed, EIA/TIA compliant.
• Eight colors. Black, blue, gray, green, orange, red, white, and yellow.

Where It Fits

It suits structured cabling installers passing an existing Cat5e drop through a wall plate to a patch cord on the other side, IT staff extending a patch cord that's a foot short rather than ordering a new one, property managers and small-office networks adding a jack where an old cable already ends in a plug, VoIP and phone installs that reuse Cat5e for handsets and need a tidy wall connection, AV and conference rooms bringing a floor-box run up to a table connection on a Gigabit network, anyone who has cut the plug off a good cable to terminate it to a jack when a coupler would have done, and a patch field that uses color to tell voice from data from cameras. It takes the same keystone opening as the Cat5e and Cat6 jacks and blank inserts in the wall plate collection; the Cat5e patch cords it joins are in the copper patch cord collection, and the COU6-90 is the Cat6 coupler for a Cat6 run.

Good to Know

A coupler adds a connection to the channel, and a Cat5e channel is allowed four connections across 100 m, so count the coupler against that budget on a long run; two patch cords through a coupler is fine, a coupler in the middle of a permanent link is where it starts to cost headroom. It's unshielded, so it belongs on UTP cable; a shielded run needs a shielded coupler to keep the drain path continuous. A Cat5e coupler caps the channel at Cat5e, so don't put one in a Cat6 run and expect Cat6 test results; use the COU6-90 there, and use this one where the cable is Cat5e anyway and a Cat6 coupler would be paying for headroom the cable can't use. Gigabit runs fine over Cat5e, which is what most of these couplers end up carrying. Snap it into the plate from the back until the latch clicks, and push each plug in until its latch seats; a plug that's half in is the usual cause of a link light that won't come up through a coupler. Match the color to your patch field convention and keep it indoors; it's a data connector, not a weatherproof one.

Specifications

Usually ships the same day.