Bill V
Well-Known Member
Some questions for those of you more familiar than me with wiring a home for an ethernet...
My house is new enough to have all the telephone wiring throughout the house done with Cat-5e wire. However, when I look at the distribution board in the basement, only four of the eight wires are plugged into the board--the rest are hanging loose, even though the board has spaces for them. It clearly is wired only for phone service, not for ethernet usage.
We only use two phone jacks in our house. One is for our main phone base--all the other phones in the house are wireless offshoots of that one main base. The other connects into our modem for DSL. All the phone jacks in the rest of the house are sitting vacant.
I'd like to connect a number of items in our house to the internet and/or an intranet using a wired connection. I'm thinking I could just use some of that existing wiring in the house to my advantage. Would it really be as simple as the following to turn most of my home's phone wiring system into a wired ethernet system?
1) Go to the distribution board and determine the three cables which are the phone company incoming line, the one going to the modem, and the one going to the main phone. Disconnect them from the board, and then connect them to each other (either by putting plugs on them and using a splitter, or by adding another board).
2) Run another Cat-5e cable from the computer to the distribution board. At the computer end, terminate it with an ethernet plug, and plug it into the router. Connect all 8 wires from that cable to the distribution board.
3) Take all the unconnected wires from cables connected to the distribution board, and connect them.
4) Go to all the unused four-wire phone jacks throughout the house, and replace them with eight-wire ethernet jacks.
Is that it? Or am I missing something?
Also, once I do this--there are a couple rooms in the house which don't currently have phone jacks, but which I will likely want to add an ethernet jack. However, there is no way to get a Cat-5e wire directly from the distribution board to those rooms. What I'm thinking to do instead is to go to a different room upstairs room which would now have a live ethernet port, and run a Cat-5e cables down through the wall from the attic to that port. At that jack, I'd add a splitter, so the jack can remain live while I can also connect the wire in the wall to the ethernet at that point. Then, up in the attic at the other end of that cable, I'd add a second distribution board--from which I can then connect Cat-5e cables running to any other room on that floor.
Does what I'm describing make sense--or are there technical details I'm not familiar with which are going to mess me up if I attempt this?
Thanks!!!!
Bill
My house is new enough to have all the telephone wiring throughout the house done with Cat-5e wire. However, when I look at the distribution board in the basement, only four of the eight wires are plugged into the board--the rest are hanging loose, even though the board has spaces for them. It clearly is wired only for phone service, not for ethernet usage.
We only use two phone jacks in our house. One is for our main phone base--all the other phones in the house are wireless offshoots of that one main base. The other connects into our modem for DSL. All the phone jacks in the rest of the house are sitting vacant.
I'd like to connect a number of items in our house to the internet and/or an intranet using a wired connection. I'm thinking I could just use some of that existing wiring in the house to my advantage. Would it really be as simple as the following to turn most of my home's phone wiring system into a wired ethernet system?
1) Go to the distribution board and determine the three cables which are the phone company incoming line, the one going to the modem, and the one going to the main phone. Disconnect them from the board, and then connect them to each other (either by putting plugs on them and using a splitter, or by adding another board).
2) Run another Cat-5e cable from the computer to the distribution board. At the computer end, terminate it with an ethernet plug, and plug it into the router. Connect all 8 wires from that cable to the distribution board.
3) Take all the unconnected wires from cables connected to the distribution board, and connect them.
4) Go to all the unused four-wire phone jacks throughout the house, and replace them with eight-wire ethernet jacks.
Is that it? Or am I missing something?
Also, once I do this--there are a couple rooms in the house which don't currently have phone jacks, but which I will likely want to add an ethernet jack. However, there is no way to get a Cat-5e wire directly from the distribution board to those rooms. What I'm thinking to do instead is to go to a different room upstairs room which would now have a live ethernet port, and run a Cat-5e cables down through the wall from the attic to that port. At that jack, I'd add a splitter, so the jack can remain live while I can also connect the wire in the wall to the ethernet at that point. Then, up in the attic at the other end of that cable, I'd add a second distribution board--from which I can then connect Cat-5e cables running to any other room on that floor.
Does what I'm describing make sense--or are there technical details I'm not familiar with which are going to mess me up if I attempt this?
Thanks!!!!
Bill