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crossover cable

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crossover cable

An Ethernet cable in which the transmit line connects to the receive line at the other end and vice versa. It is used today primarily to connect one computer to another for data transfer. In the past, it was widely used to connect hubs and switches to each other to maintain the built-in crossover that would have been reversed if connected with a regular cable.

The ports in modern hubs and switches automatically sense whether they are connecting to other hubs and switches rather than to computers and perform the crossover accordingly. See null modem cable.


In the Past
To connect old hubs and switches to each other via their already-crossed "MDI-X" ports required a crossover cable. There was usually one port on the hub or switch that had the crossover built in (for details, see MDI port).







Today
The most common use for a crossover cable nowadays is to connect two computers together via Ethernet. (Image courtesy of Micro Center, www.microcenter.com)
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References in periodicals archive
Replacing the switches with transparent clocks with no data traffic (case 4) provides results very similar to the crossover cable. The master-slave mean offset is 76 ns with a standard deviation of 10 ns and pk-pk range of 126 ns.
In this demonstration, the statistical performance of slave-synchronization accuracy in the network with transparent clocks was nearly identical to a crossover cable except for a 15-ns shift.
Improving synchronization with 1588 transparent clocks
If your Macintosh has an AAUI Ethernet port, you'll need to use 10Base-T transceiver, as well as a crossover cable.
You can purchase an Ethernet crossover cable and transceiver at an Apple-authorized retailer.
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Users upgrading from a 2-node network will especially appreciate the router's Auto-UplinkT feature that supports both standard and crossover cables.
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All four Ethernet ports detect and correct crossover cables and the 9300-RADES automatically selects 10 or 100MB speed.
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Each transceiver also supports software configuration, making network installation and maintenance easier and eliminating the need for special crossover cables.
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In addition, each twisted pair port has an auto-MDIX feature, eliminating the need for crossover cables. A backplane speed of 2.6 Gbps allows full wire-speed capability on all ports simultaneously.--N-Tron
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It automatically identifies crossover cables, hub uplink ports, cable length, opens and split pairs.
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