As someone who wired alot of rs232, I agree that this doesn't make a net reduction in work or confusion. It even makes one thing worse by using the same rj45 a

As someone who wired alot of rs232, I agree that this doesn't make a net reduction in work or confusion. It even makes one thing worse by using the same rj45 as ethernet, for something other than ethernet. You can (and could in the 80s and 90s) buy idc db9 & db25 which would give you the same crimping convenience while using a connector that is both distinct from ethernet, and actually already pdesent on all the rs232 devices. I did still terminate serial and telcom cables in rj45 patch panels right along side ethernet, but I only considered that a necessity not actually a good thing. It's maybe kinda sorta neat in the imaginary world where all devices were already wired with right plugs and the right pinout, but not in the world where you have to make all those adapters. The only situation where it might help would be in some organization that randomly connected modems to modems and then disconnected them and reconnected to printers and terminals, and then swapped around again to some other random connections. What operation ever does that? Maybe a school lab? I never once needed to take a printer that was connected to a computer and connect it instead to a modem or another printer. Everything I ever had to move or change, was only to something equivalent. Maybe moving a printer from a direct connection to inserting a serial ram buffer between the pc & printer, or moving the printer from a direct connection to a print server, or moving a modem from one computer to another computer. The type of cable never needed to change, so a universal cable wouldn't matter. This ambidextrous thing is kinda nice in theory but really would not have saved me any real time or effort. I'd still have exactly the same effort just in the adapters, only now it's 3 things I have to make and get right and troubleshoot later, instead of one. 2 adapters & a cable instead of a cable. The part of the system from adpter to adapter is simpler, but the entire system including the adapters is actually worse than the normal way. At the very least, to give this any justification at all, it has to use a pinout that works with off the shelf ethernet cables, which this pinout doesn't. It does work with flat phone cables, but those suck for long rs232 runs because of no shielding and parallel lines.