Damaged, chewed or tangled. Cable tidy & repairs Across Nottingham

The job

What I fix

• Slow cables. Wrong grade, badly terminated, untwisted too far, or joined with couplers and tape. One customer’s upstairs home office cable, fitted by another engineer, tested at 97 Mbps on a 500 Mbps line. I replaced the cable and the boxes. His speed test afterwards read 547 Mbps. Same broadband, same house. His review is on the reviews page, with his advice not to pay twice.
• Damaged cable. Chewed, cut or cracked. Repaired, or re-run somewhere the dog can’t reach. The puppy is a real review.
• Messy cable. Cable looping across walls, over a conservatory roof, behind the sofa and under the rug. Re-clipped along the mortar line outside, dropped into slim trunking inside, then labelled.
• Wrong place. Sockets and routers where the last engineer found it easiest, not where you use them. Moved.
• Dead boxes. Old provider boxes with coax hanging out of them. The ones that do nothing come off the wall. Anything live stays until the provider deals with it.
• Cabinets. Business cabinets that have grown sideways. Leads dressed, ports numbered, the numbers written on the panel. More on business network cabling.

How I approach it

Tester on before anything gets replaced, so you’re not paying to replace something that works. Then I re-run what’s dead, re-terminate what’s sloppy and leave alone what’s fine.

I don’t slag off the last engineer. I show you what the tester says and tell you what I’d change. Every new faceplate gets a hand-written label so you know which port goes where. Every run gets tested again before I pack up, and the old leads leave with me.

If the real problem is WiFi rather than cable, I’ll say so. That’s a different page: WiFi problems. If what you need is a fresh run to a room that never had one, see ethernet sockets or the full list of services.

Three jobs, before and after

The photo pairs on this page are the same job, before and after.

• The hallway. Loose purple Cat6 hanging in coils where the runs came in. Afterwards, two four-port faceplates, each port labelled by hand, the cable strapped neat from the trunking.
• The wall cabinet. A loose bundle of Cat6 hanging in the cabinet. Afterwards, a 24-port patch panel, numbered, with the cables dressed behind it.
• The garage. Cables draped across the blockwork. Afterwards, clipped in line under the pipes, so nothing hangs and nothing snags.

There are more befores than afters in the tidy-ups on my work page. Some jobs I only photographed once, so those befores stand on their own.

What it costs

No price list, because a repair depends on how much of the old work stays and how much has to come out. Anything that has to be undone first is one of the things that moves the price, and so is the length of any new run. Send me a photo of the problem, one of the router, and your postcode. I’ll come back with a figure or arrange to look, and nothing starts until you’ve got it. How pricing works.