What is a patch panel/what are they used for?

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matessim

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Apr 8, 2009
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i was wondering about this for a while and cant find a solid answer anywhere it seems... some places online compare patch panels to switches or a device that takes many ports and turns them into 1 cable, would anyone give me a solid definition use?

i also saw on some places it as some device that people separate the cables inside the ethernet cable and plug them into something.

sorry for the n00b answer... but its really been itching my brain.
 
A patch panel has a panel of jacks that you connect to the wiring going through your walls to all the jacks. This is a good pic of the front, while this shows what the back looks like. Rather than simply having 20 cables with RJ45 plugs sticking out of a hole in the wall in your networking closet, all the cables are punched down on the back of the patch panel. You then use a regular patch cable to connect the patch panel's jack to the switch's port.

It doesn't really add any new functionality over just running cables out of the wall directly into the switch ports. However, it does make it much cleaner (1, 2), and easier to connect different devices to different ports.
 
how are the cables passed through the walls? with one large cable? it sounds quite difficult also to split each Ethernet cable head then connect etc, no?
 
Oh oh sorry ignore the message before i think i get it, it turns many cables into one?

but doesn't it cause loss of bandwidth?

EDIT: sorry i looked at pictures again now i think i understand,

but between the front and the back what cable goes through? and do you need to manually stip each ethernet cap and put each like cable inside the cable in its own thingy? (theres like 6 cables in one cat5 or cat6 right? so you need to to take each one in them and connect it to the back?
 
No, it's not a splitter or an aggregator.

A patch panel is simply a termination point - it allows for 'clean' and easily maintained network connections where many are needed. If the patch panel is twenty-four ports you still need twenty-four cables, though they could be bound together.

An example of their use would be this --- you need twenty-four connections in an area. Perhaps the other ends go back to one area as well, or if in a home environment perhaps they go all over, but you want this end to be cenralized. If you were to simply terminate them with a standard end, there would essentially be twenty-four single cables sitting there. Not only does this look messy but unless you took great care to label these cables individually, you may not know which one goes where. With a patch panel, you run all of the cables into the back of it and then label the front. This gives you a look and feel much like a home fuse/circuit breaker box - it looks clean and you know which wire goes where. You then use shorter patch cables to go from the patch panel to your switch.

Hope that helps put it into perspective.
 
Wow Thanks! that was quite clear i think i get it :p

but may i ask, why are the cables getting split in the backs, doesn't it take extremely long time to seperate then connect one by one?
 
Usually a patch panel is used when pulling cable, so the cables are not terminated. So you run raw cable from point A, to Point B. Generally when done all the boxes of bulk cable are where all the cables will terminate at, like a wiring closet or server room. Then they are pulled till they are close to the group of offices they will service. Then each cable is fished down the wall and out the hole in the wall. They are then terminated to the wall plate on one end, and the patch panel on the other end. There is no RJ-45 to clip off and split out.

The only thing you have to do is clip the end out of the box, strip off the outside casing, and untwist a little bit.

Patch panels also help if you have ports that may not be in use today, but may be later. Or if you are running both voice and data, this way you can put mutiple jacks per office and then back in the wiring closet run one port to the voice side, and one port to the data side, with the racks being different racks.

Generally you see a lot of patch panels in businesses, large enterrpises can have a full 2 post rack of them, with cables running to voice on one side, and data on the otherside of the 2 post rack.
 
waitwaitwaitwait...

so is this the reason i sometimes see something that looks like a switch with all it cables running to a switch under it?

but if you got a 24 switch and a 24 patch panel and you run them all down, how would you connect your internet, why dont the switches have 1 more connection then?
 
If you had a 24 port switch and a 24 port patch panel, then you would either need a second switch, or to not plug in a port on the patch panel.

As an example, here in the house I have a 12 port patch panel, and a 16 port switch. However, I only have 11 items plugged into the patch panel. That includes Internet connectivity, and the Wireless AP. So I only have 9 rooms plugged into the switch. I didn't need all the rooms plugged in. My son's room has a connection, but his computer sits in the living room, so he doesn't use the one in his room. The one in the dining room, and the kitchen are also not plugged in at this time.

You don't have to have everything plugged in. At the office we have a ton of jacks that are not plugged in because they are in strange places, or rooms changed, or what have you over the past 10 - 15 years. Some switches have a port in the back to connect them into other switches. Sometimes you may have a switch on another floor and have a port on the patch panel connecting the two floors.

At work we have part of the floor above us, I ran 10 runs between the two floors. Only 4 of those runs are in use between the floors. When I get the new switches in play next week then I will be using 5 of the runs because I will be trunking two ports on each switch.
 
4291_1077861102172_1095570040_30228762_1278019_n.jpg


I stole this image out of the Network Gallery sub-forum, in the show us your network setup thread.

At the bottom you see the switch, above that is the cable management, and above that is the patch panel. Then another switch, another cable management panel, and the patch panel. This picture is not the finished product.
 
matessim said:
ty, that was quite helpful

what does trunking mean?
Click to expand...

Trunking is where you take mutiple connections between two switches to combine them into a single connection. So if I took 4 - 1GB ports to make a single 4GB pipe between two switches, like from the server room to the core switch, and from the upstairs to the downstairs. This would allow more to be pushed between the those three switches, so if someone was saturating the connection between them and the switch, it wouldn't saturate the link to the server on another switch.
 
i see, thanks, but in the example pic, i don't see any connection between the switches, and the switches don't seem to be connected to internet or anything between the switches, or is this happening with the wires behiend? I.E router connected to both switches from the patch panel?
 
matessim said:
i see, thanks, but in the example pic, i don't see any connection between the switches, and the switches don't seem to be connected to internet or anything between the switches, or is this happening with the wires behiend? I.E router connected to both switches from the patch panel?
Click to expand...

It could be a picture of a branch distro closet...like connecting a hallway/floor/wing of a building, in which case commonly each switch has a home run uplink cable going to a centralized switch...up in the main server room for example. Plugged into that central switch would likely be an uplink to the router/firewall.
 
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