Kutiman-Thru-you – 01 – Mother of All Funk Chords

At work we have a 48RU open rack for our patch rack. To those of you who had that fly over your head, it’s where we make phones and network connections happen.

Neatpatch promises to sort that out. After some pretty poor service from the local distributor, I finally received 6 of these at work, choosing to source the cables locally (where I can get a very good discount by purchasing in bulk). And here are some results, using a pair of 48 port switches in my desk-top rack stand to show a dense cabling setup:

OK, so after going through their website and looking at the alternatives, I made the pitch to my employer to purchase these in order to fix up our patch rack. This work will happen when we do our VoIP rollout and our cabling requirements will go from volatile (i.e. constant phone repatches while manglement play musical chairs with staff) to set-and-forget.

Whenever I get something new, I look for what’s wrong with it, and, well… I have gripes with the Neatpatch kit.

1) They talk about dividing by 24 as an industry standard, yet they only provide 16 slots for the cables, meaning some get three cables, some get four. This kind of denser loading makes it trickier to remove some cables, and is also difficult to unclip the inside row of RJ-45’s.

1b) They announced that this was (albeit slightly) fixed with their new product revision, now isn’t that a gripe! They’ve made the slots wider. I’d have personally preferred 24 slots so that in a dense setup you’d have two cables per slot. But maybe there’s a good reason to leave it at 16.

2) We tend to telco mount our switches so that they sit a bit more balanced in our racks. The Neatpatch kits don’t work well at all with telco mounted equipment, so we have to flush mount them. This is ok once some unused rubber feet are put on the back top edge of the neatpatch, thus using the neatpatch to get the switch sitting level.

Apart from that, I’m very happy with the product, and can’t wait to get it into our patch rack