A couple weeks ago my Netgear router bit the dust. I consoled myself with a new Linksys 802.11 g router

I found that both the Internet port and the the UTP cable are both dead. I thought it was just the port but when I tried to use the cable for another purpose it was useless. I retested the old router and the internet port is definitely bad. I had noticed minor symptoms for the last few months, but not bad enough to try to track down.

Is this just a coincidence? What could cause both the port and the cable to go bad at the same time?

Thanks,
Jeff

Hi there,

I had something happen just like that today with a Belkin, except it took out the onboard ethernet controller too!!! I was at a loss for a few minutes to think that all three were bad.

dazed_confused

I work at a medium sized radio station up here in New Hampshire and we just suffered a lightning struck a few weeks ago. Besides losing a half dozen $300 kvm extenders, we also lost several switches along with a few NIC's. Now the interesting thing was that the switches that got blown out wern't totally dead. In regards to the one 15 port switch we had, the lightning killed about half the ports. The rest were fine.

In regards to the kvm extenders, the lightning go to them through the cat 5. In this case it would have paid off to have some cat 5 surge protectors hooked up.