House was wired with Cat5 now what?

Well my parents left me with setting up their network in the house. It's a pretty nice size house and we will have a home office as well as 3 other computers sharing access all across the house. There are 2 laptops, so definitely will be going wireless. The house was wired with cat5 jacks in all the rooms. My question is, is there a central location I need to put this router? If so I probably need to talk to the guys who did the wiring to find out where. I wouldn't imagine I could just use a port in the room I wanted and set it up like that. We will be going with Cox and will also be using their digital phone line service. They said no router or modem is needed because the modem is built in to the box they will be bringing out. Help me figure this out please!

The router needs to go wherever the patch panel was installed at. Or, you could place the router in a room, connect it to a jack, then at the patch panel put a switch connecting all the rooms.

I assume by router you mean wireless router, right? If thats the case, read on, if not, feel free to slap me.

Location of the router all depends on size of the house, and which router (a/b/g). I have a g sitting in my room, on one side of the house and we can use it on the other end, and we have a pretty long house. For the best connectivity, I would think placing it closest to the center of the house would be best. Good luck!

Well I will proably purchase a wireless router, but I really would like to utilize the wired network. So, what I need to find is the patch panel and that's where I need to have the modem/cox internet connection connected to a router.

It seems like it would either be in the attic, near the power breaker, or wherever the phones terminate.

Well took a look today and found all the wires all bundled up in a nice place right underneath the stairs. There has to be about 75 different connections. These are my phone lines, cable lines, and cat5 as well. I'm not too sure what I will be doing now. So, it appears as though there is no patch panel installed. So, I'm guessing I will need to be purchasing one of those as well as connectors and a crimper. I think I will be having fun trying to figure out what wires are what. I seperated the cable wires, as they are labeled rg6 (I know that's a type of coax). They are marked with the names of each room so that makes it easier, just have to figure out which are the cat5 (couldn't find the marking on the side) and the phone line.

Once you get the patch panel installed you can get a tool that helps you identify which wire goes where to help with labeling. Here is where I got mine:

http://shop2.outpost.com/category/O...ment/Network+Test+&+Measurement/Wire+Tracers/

Hopefully that helps, good luck