We have an Ethernet cable that runs above ground from our house livebox to our gîte. The internet has stopped working in the gîte. I’ve checked everything. Is it possible the heat has caused the cable to fail?
Probably not per se as typical temperature ratings are from -30 to +60°C
Didn’t you mention a join in the middle though?
How did you actually do the join?
RJ45 coupler for cat6 cable. Working perfectly this morning. I had a spare, so I changed to the spare. No difference.
How is it protected from the elements?
Would you be in a position to connect a laptop at he point of the join to see if the signal is getting that far?
How long was it altogether? Ethernet is only specced up to about 100m of cable (even Cat 6) and a coupler will reduce that overall rather than increase it.
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Oh, and the most obvious question - are das blinkenlights on at each end of the connection?
Thanks for this Billy. Lights both ends. Bear in mind all of this has worked fine for weeks and nothing has changed.
It MAY be the long cable - plugged straight into back of laptop and no signal. Good point about trying first half of long cable. At moment testing it’s not the livebox LAN.
If you have lights both ends it suggests that it’s not the Ethernet connection per se but a “higher layer” problem.
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As with all techie problems have you switched off/on the router, all network switches and the devices connected at the far end?
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Yes. And in the right order - I hope
I presume you plugged in the RJ45 cable into multiple ports in the router. Another option is to reset your router to factory settings. I don’t think it might help but worth trying.
For a period in Cardiff there was a shared cross city network using Pringles Cans as cheap directional antenna.
Similar approaches seem to still be practicable.
If its just the laptop thats lost connection but both sets of lights are blinking - does the laptop connect to internet in the main house through the ethernet or not? Or is it on wifi…
What do you plug the cable into in the gîte? Directly into a pc or laptop, or into a router (so that devices in the gîte can connect to the internet wirelessly)?
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Thanks everyone for your interest and suggestions.
For those interested …
We have a livebox in our main house (fibre).
The cottage had its own ADSL but the wire down to the cottage broke and the technician who came was only interested in installing fibre so his “repair” lasted 5 minutes. Needing a connection to the cottage, which is about 80 metres away, I attached a LAN cat 6 ethernet cable to the back of the livebox in the house, drilled a hole through the wall and draped the wire through the garden, past the swimming pool down to the cottage and brought it in through an upstairs window into the back of a TP-link router which gave us internet and wi-fi very successfully in the cottage through winter and spring.
As @billybutcher remembered, the cable was in two halves (accident with mower I think) and I bought some RJ45 connectors and proudly spliced the two halves together. All worked well until the other day when in the morning we had internet and in the blisteringly hot afternoon we did not. Hence my question about high temperatures.
I tested (I thought) everything, until Billy asked me had I checked the first half of the cable, from the back of the livebox. You were right BIlly, it was that cable that had no signal.
Over these days I’ve been too busy to explore further until this morning.
I was right - it IS the heat! 
Winding up the dud cable I got as far as the tall metal support for one of our roses, over which I’d draped it. And there it was. The support had got so hot it had melted the cable sheath and a couple of the fine wires inside. Satisfying to know why.
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Perhaps SF should stand for “Solutions Found”. Nice to see the forum solves another problem.
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Ah, so locally much hotter than just the ambient temp. Quite a bit hotter if it literally melted the insulation.
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Talking about heat, when we moved we “inherited” some of that woven plastic garden furniture. Had early aperos with friends a few days ago and the wine glasses acted like magnifying glasses and burnt holes in the table top. Easy to see how forest fires could start from littered glass.
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I wonder what it’s doing to our roses?
Ah, you need to keep them topped up with wine at all times so as to diffuse the light. 
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Probably less damage if the table caught fire 