How to test my Cat6 cable?

Question

I've crimped my first RJ45 connector onto a Cat6 network cable and it seems to work fine (yey Internet). Now I wonder, how to test the cable thoroughly, i.e., how to test whether it is able to reach its Gigabit maximum?

I do not have one of those fancy cable testers which are horribly expensive. Is it enough to copy some file from one computer to another and check the data transfer speed? Are there any command line utilities (Windows 10) to test network loss on high-speed transfer?

Answer 1

While a network tester would give you a proper readout of a correctly terminated cable, there are some alternative methods that could help you out instead: Moving large chunks of data across it should give you a rough idea, but you need to keep in mind factors such as TCP overhead, which will eat away some of your bandwidth.

If your endpoint hardware can keep up with it, a large transfer with speed close to what you'd expect will be a good sign it's correct.

Keep in mind that other factors might also reduce the throughput, such as network collisions and EM interference.