L-com Cat-5e non-plenum is $89/1000ft. I buy BerkTek from Graybar Electric for $69/1000ft. In most cities, there should be a place where the small telephone and network companies buy stuff, like Eagle Electronics here in LA. Prices still higher than the big distibutors, but not too bad for most items.

Wire is critical. I usually use BerkTek which always pulls and terminates without breaks. Belden and Esix also work well. I worked with some AT&T cable that broke if you looked at it wrong - very difficult to terminate. One client's telephone cabler pulled two brands of Cat-5 for their network. One brand wouldn't work with the client's 10BaseT network cards. Took me hours to figure out why some connections worked and some didn't.

Had one guy recently do his own wiring. Figured if both ends were crimped in the same order, it'd work. Well, it didn't work at all, because his twisted pairs weren't right - electrically fine, but no network.

A crimper isn't needed unless you're going to crimp RJ45 plugs directly to the Cat-5 cables (not recommended - they start giving hard to locate trouble down the road). Terminate solid wire to jacks and use pre-made patch cables (they use stranded wire which works fine with crmiped RJ45 plugs). I use ICC jacks and never have opens. Leviton is more popular, but every time someone uses them I have to take time to fix opens.

I rarely use patch panels even though I know where to get them at a reasonable price (most sources charge way too much). I usually terminate to a 110 frame which can make a very compact installation in tight spots. Here's [link|http://www.aaxnet.com/images/bbotn.jpg|an example]. Yes, that's a 300 pair frame where I'd normally use a 100 pair frame - plans got changed. The cables from the 110 blocks to the hub are just Cat-5 patch cables cut in half.

Sometimes I overdo the 100 frame concept, as I did at [link|http://www.aaxnet.com/images/bbdci.jpg|Diagnostic Center]. Patch pannels would have been a little less work here.

I sometimes use the 66M block format patch panels, although I didn't do [link|http://www.aaxnet.com/images/bboto.jpg|this one].

Oh, yes, I just remembered, I have [link|http://www.aaxnet.com/design/wiredt.html|More pictures] on my Web site.

I've used several different types, and if you're going to crimp your own RJ45s, especially to solid wire, one of these will be essential. If you use the right hardware ([link|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=81329|shameless self reference]), they aren't needed on a modest project. I use a tester mainly when I'm not the one who's going to plug in the equipment, just to make sure.

Some testers produce really hard to interpret results if the device at one end of the cable is wired 568B and the other end 568A. The officaial standard is 568A, but only a few weirdos use that in the U.S.. The consnsus standard is 568B (WECO (Western Electric Company) format). Nothing is as screwy as a site where some ding-dong has installed 568A devices (because it's right) when the rest of the place is 568B.

Oh yes, one other thing, I use the tester a lot when someone has used Leviton jacks. If they start with the brown pair, the blue pair is often open. Blue doesn't mater for most Ethernet, but a lot of my applications use the same cabling for serial data.