Cat 5 wired house questions

dissonance

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 16, 2005
Messages
281
My new house is wired for cat 5 and I was wondering what the benefits of this are. There's a panel in the master closet that is supposed to connect into it. I'm wondering if I can get a cable modem and maybe a router and wire the whole house in different rooms to plug into the cat 5 wall outlets. If not, I'll have to set up a wireless network. Thanks for any help.
 
Most new homes in my area are using Cat 5 cable for Telephone, as that is 4 pair wiring, 4 telephone numers in the house you can have.
 
"What the benefits are"????

Dude, rejoice! My last home (now my rental) is wired like that and it is a true blessing. High speed internet and fast file transfers to every PC in the home without any of the wireless headaches!

Yes, the purpose of the patch panel in the closet is to hook up a router and share your cable modem's connection with every room in the home.
 
You can easily hookup another telephone line into your house, older homes just have either 2 pair or mine just had 2 wires, 1 line :(

It is a minimum charge of $70/hour through Bell Canada, to get somebody to install wires apparently.

Some new homes have both, Cat 5 and telephone.
 
The wall outlets are cat 5, telephone, and cable in all the rooms. Do I need a hub or router? Would I just put a cable modem and router/hub in my closet and hook it up to the access panel in the closet?

And finally, if the den is going to have 2 computers in it, how do I go about hooking those 2 computers up to the network through the one cat 5 wall outlet?

Thanks for any help.
 
They used Cat5 for everything in this house, phone, intercom, and data jacks. Only the security guys clung to Cat3 for their stuff. Basically, the way you describe it, you have a RJ45 data jack in each room. In my case, they were too lazy to put in a patch panel for data jacks (only put in a phone patch), so all the data lines were already terminated with the standard -45 connector, which then goes into my Belkin gigabit switch, which in turn is run by an ipcop box, which is fed by a cable modem.

So basically, you want to find the "home run", as it's known, of all the data jacks in the house. If they're already crimped (unlikely), you can just plug 'em into a switch, and the switch into a router, router to modem. If not, you can either feed 'em through a patch panel, or crimp the ends and feed directly to the switch.
 
If you've got RJ45 jacks in every room, then you'll need three things:

Broadband modem with ethernet jack
Broadband router
Ethernet switch

You may not need the switch. I went ahead and listed a seperate switch because most routers have four or five ports, and most wired homes have more than four or five cables.

Make sure you have a phone/cable jack in the same room as your network panel.

edit: if you've only got one jack in a room and want to put two computers in it, the best thing to do is just buy a 4-port switch for that room.
 
I need a switch in my case, since I have 12 ports around the house. And I wanted an excuse to use ipcop. :D You could use the switch with a regular SOHO router though, just connect switch to one of the LAN ports on the router, and cable modem to the router's WAN port. Note that you'll need Cat5e to get gigabit speeds, if you go that route though.
 
movax said:
I need a switch in my case, since I have 12 ports around the house. And I wanted an excuse to use ipcop. :D

I'd forgotten about ipcop. Any reason you prefer it over SmoothWall? I'm looking to build a Linux router/firewall to replace my cheap Netgear one once I get my own wiring closet finished.

movax said:
You could use the switch with a regular SOHO router though, just connect switch to one of the LAN ports on the router, and cable modem to the router's WAN port. Note that you'll need Cat5e to get gigabit speeds, if you go that route though.

In case you (the OP) are a complete novice, be sure you use the uplink port on the switch if it has one. I've seen many a home network where switches weren't properly linked and no one knew what the problem was.

Odds are if the house is fairly new and has RJ45 jacks that it's Cat5e. It's always best to check if you can see the cables, though.
 
PopeKevinI said:
I'd forgotten about ipcop. Any reason you prefer it over SmoothWall? I'm looking to build a Linux router/firewall to replace my cheap Netgear one once I get my own wiring closet finished.
I think Smoothwall charges for the full featured version, but ipcop was the first one I head of, under development, and stable, so I chose that one. No complaints at all, except I wish the Advanced QoS was built in from the start. :)
 
I'm all moved into the house so I have access to everything now. The wiring system is a Square D SDM18bw. I'm not sure how to set it up. There's this panel that has a bunch of cat5 lines connected to it. Spots 0-6 are already connected up. It looks like cat5 with each individual wire plugged in to each port. How would I plug my router in? The person at comcast seemed to think that I get a short cat5 cable from my router and connect each of the wires to the next open spot on the panel and it would work. I'm a little lost on this. Hopefully some of it makes sense.
 
A picture or two would greatly help us help you.

The back of the patch panel should have cables punched down that lead to the various rooms. You would plug your switch ports into the front ports on the panel. From what you are saying, 6 of the ports are already taken and that makes me wonder where those run to. If the ports aren't labeled then a cable testing kit, with remote ends, will save you some headache.
 
Here is an image of the box. I tried going cable > cable modem > router > panel, but I didn't get it to work. I connected the router to the panel by cutting off the cat5 head and running it through the leads on the bottom input. I haven't installed any software.

cimg0046a0xp.jpg
 
I personally work with patch panels, installing exactly what you have, Now there are many variations on the same theme, however yours looks to me like its a hub, just not covered in plastic and with the plugin ends.

For Reference, I will be labeling each plug in from 1 to 10, 1 is the very bottom 10 is the highest.
The plug is the 'White orange, orange, white blue, blue etc,' plug where the wires are hooked into

#1 would be the input, the way it works is you have the standard Ethernet Straight through coloring on the plug, this is so you can take your RJ-45 wiring and plug it into the jack, the other end would have a RJ-45 crimped end that you would plug into a router (or whatever).

From 2 to 10 would be outlets, remember this is a hub, the wiring in all these, would probably all go to the same colors. All white oranges line up, all oranges, etc.

Ports 2 to 10 are one end of a RJ-45 cable, the other end (the crimped end) would be in a bedroom hooking up to a Pc, whatever.

So what the majority of people do as the box is usually designed around having a power outlet, is to have your router and 'black box' usually the decoder unit supplied by your ISP, all in the same box.
You run the phone line to your black box, the black box to the router's WAN port using a straight through cable, then the router would have a port connected to the crimpted end on #1's cable.

Your house then get 10-100 network through the rest, the picture looks like 7 spots are already ready to go.

I hope this helps, msg me if you need more info.
 
Thanks for the replies :) I still haven't got it to work yet though. I went coaxial > cable modem > router > patch panel. My patch panel is labeled 0-9 with 0 at the top. I plugged the router into spots 9 and 6 and neither worked. I'm not sure what I need to do.I took off one of the cat5 outlets on my wall and I noticed that the brown and brown/white wires were not connected to the outlet. I don't know if this really matters for the net though.
 
What do the markings on that panel say? Is there a manufacturer or model number?

The reason I ask is because, from that picture, I'd swear that was a telephone distribution module. On the telephone modules, pin1 connects to pin1 on each row, pin2 to every pin2, etc.

If that were a CAT5 module for data networks, it would normally have the 110 connectors that would be traced on the PCB to an RJ45 jack. In that case, you'd punch the data runs into the panel, and then use a short patch cable to go from the panel to your router/switch/hub etc.

EDIT: Also, are u sure the blue wires go to the CAT5 jacks on the walls? What color is the outer sheath of the calbing going to your phone jacks? Do you know where the grey cables in the lower-right of the panel go?
 
I took the cover off one of the outlets on the wall in one of the rooms and it's a blue cord going to the ethernet input. I was just surprised that the brown and brown/white wires aren't attached to it but maybe those aren't required for broadband?

I believe that grey cord is the phone wire (the phone guys are coming Thursday to hook up my phone). So having looked at the jackets that go to the outlets I'm pretty sure the blues are data and the grey goes to the phone.

That green panel says it's a Leviton brand. I'm not sure what the model is. There's a bunch of numbers on it:

0509
PWB 58141-02
94V-0
E206420/1
NE2000
PWA58141-
 
Well, I found this which looks like exactly what you have. If it is the same, then that's a phone panel.

The other tip-off is that the brown-pair is not terminated. Anyone who installs data cabling would be retarted if they didnt terminate the brown. Technically, 10/100 Ethernet does not use the brown or the blue, but all 4 pairs are required for gigabit. Whereas it's fairly common for phone contractors to only terminate 2 or 3 pairs and leave the others disconnected.

When the guys come out thursday to hook up your phone, they will most like do two things:

1) Hook up their lines to the lines coming into your house.

2) Hook up the line coming into the house into that panel if it's not already. Once that's done, you will have dialtone to every jack that's wired to that panel.

Now, to hook up the data jacks, you'll need something like this. This will let you hook up your data cabling to the panel using the 110-style blocks. Then small patch cords will connect the panel to the switch. When I did this, I got a small switch that i could place inside the wiring panel with the patch panels.
 
yeah, that is just a phone patch. you will need the data style like the one that was posted above.
 
I'd say rip out that telephone block, replace it with a network block, and get a cordless phone. :)

Here's the setup I've got, using the leviton network blocks:

 
JBark said:
I'd say rip out that telephone block, replace it with a network block, and get a cordless phone. :)

I dunno if I'd go that far. Depending on the size of the house, cordless phones can be spotty.

Keep the phone distribution panel, but ensure that the phone jacks are wired to it. Then snag a data panel and wire the data jacks to it.
 
Your electricians may have wired the phones up to 8 wire phone jacks, which are not always rated for cat5e. If only one pair of wires are not connected to the jack, it looks like they wired you up for a 3 line house. That panel does not appear to contain enough wires to have your whole house wired up for networking, unless those gray/white cables in the right of your pic are cat5.
 
Back
Top