Review on 🔌 Cable Matters 24-Port Keystone Patch Panel: Rackmount or Wall Mount Blank Panel for Keystone Jacks by Keith Maynard

I love these patch panels. They look beautiful, are easy to use and flexible. They also have very good cable management on the back. If you look at the first picture for the red wires you can see how each one is attached. Excellent! You can see in the first and second picture that I'm using 23 regular keystones. Plus 1 empty stub in the 24th position. The best part is that you can FIRST install the cables on all your cables and then slide them into place. This makes work considerably easier. I've had another one that required you to wire all the wires on the patch panel at once, which really made for a bulky mess and was very difficult to do in my small closet. So I went that route instead. On the second patch panel, as you can see in the 3rd picture, there are 2 keystones on the right side. These are 2 of 9 NEW Cat6 cables I have installed and these 2 are going in the garage for future security cameras. Then there are some gaps in the middle and through the trapeze stones on the left. This allows me to run cables from other equipment in this rack, from the router, Tivo Stream, HD HomeRun, etc., to plug them behind a patch panel where the cable can be hidden, and then a short cable to the router like everyone else is doing nice professional work. Instead of just pulling a wire out of some hole in the switch. The third picture shows a nice clean install using the same cables from the front. I have free slots for future expansion. I don't think it's likely. But then 5 years ago I decided I didn't have to crawl on my stomach anymore when I first ran all the Cat6 cables. Here I still run 9. 3 in one room, 4 in another room and 2 in the garage. By the way, I uploaded the fourth photo. That's how it was just before I changed everything. This was my 5 year old setup so you can see the before and after. In fact, how much I've learned over the years and what I could afford and had time for back then. I did this job right after I got this house 5 years ago. But you can see all the different colored Cat 6 wires and they're just scattered all over the place. So I'm a big fan of these patch panels from Cable Matters. I had a couple of keystones that didn't install the way they should. The bottom wasn't exactly like that, and then it was difficult to pull them out. I've found that you can press the bottom and inside of the keystone and it fully snaps into place and you're good to go. I like that it makes things easier when you're not trying to put all the wires on one board at the back of the patch panel like so many others. You also get the flexibility to use any number of different keystones to suit your needs. You don't even have to use black like I did. You may use different colors. For example red for one room, blue for another and so on and so on. You can use HDMI keystone and audio etc. That's the great thing about this design. The end results look very nice. The possibilities of what you can do are almost limitless. But what is particularly important is the excellent cable management on the back of this patch panel. It is difficult! You don't want future problems with your cables. You want a device that will last you for many years. Using my label printer and two-line printing, I was able to create little labels to show what went into each port. This thing has a place to label each port. I also have labels for every outlet in my house. So I know it's port 3 in the master bedroom. I also checked each wire to make sure they were all in good condition as I've boo-booed a few times. I used a Fluke Networks MS2-100 cable tester. So what do you think? You can't go wrong with this 24 Port Cable Matters Cat6 Keystone Patch Panel. I'm a big fan and recommend it to anyone who will be taking on this type of work. All these things are really not that complicated. The hardest part? I slide around my house on my stomach in the mud, and spiders and so on to stretch the cables. Cut the necessary holes in the walls and under the house to route the wiring, and when finished, fill the holes with foam. Everything selfmade. There was nobody else here. All these other things besides time are not that complicated. My father doesn't understand that at all. But you can learn that. It's pretty easy. A little planning for what YOU want and it all falls into place. Updated 11/17/2019. I added another closeup picture to see how I labeled my ports. As you can see there isn't much space. I used a standard Brothers printer. Then I used double line printing, which made the text much smaller. I would make sure to add a few spaces between each piece so there is more room for neat cutting. You can only place 3 to 4 letters or numbers or combinations. So MB1 will be master bedroom 1. DR1 will be my father's room 1 as he lives in my house. The RMC will be the remote control for my UPS etc. They have the same label on the keystones in the wall at all my locations. That way, if there are ever problems, it's easy to troubleshoot. I use Cable Matters keystones with these regular keystones along with their keystone pass which allows me to plug in things like my router or my NAS cables that sit on these shelves to connect to the back of the keystone, and then just add a short patch cord to keep everything else looking neat. I'm also using some Cable Matters blanks to fill in some of the holes I didn't need to use for keystones at the time to help tidy up my rack. Keystones like this are the way to go.