Been There, Done That, Bought The T-Shirt. Solid core is generally for premise wiring (PVC jacketed in walls, PTFE-jacketed through ducts); stranded is typical

Been There, Done That, Bought The T-Shirt. Solid core is generally for premise wiring (PVC jacketed in walls, PTFE-jacketed through ducts); stranded is typically for patch cables. If you try like the first place I worked at in the mid-90's trying to put stranded ends on solid-core wire, breaking of tools and unreliable cables will make. There's cheapo Chinese cable tester kits on eBay, AliBaba and Amazon that do a good-enough impedance at GbE spectrum testing to not have to spring for a Fluke "will-survive-nuclear-winter" "official" tester. Backfilling connectors with epoxy is another idea to avoid corrosion... as long as it doesn't affect the impedance or dielectric values much. No-snag boots, axial aligned label zipties are also a big help. Barcode label and floorplan everything. Finally, always test every cable with iperf3 (two laptops or one laptop w two ethernet ports) and reject for reworking/replacment any cable with abnormal latency or bandwidth figures. PS: our head-office networking guy was awesome; worked 10% time just to keep benefits since his wife was GOOG's first admin.