Hi all, I am currently having a home built and had a question about the CAT5e wiring being installed. I have each room pulled with a CAT5e wire back to a central location in the house. This is what the builder did for the phones. I know that phones only use 2 wires of the 8 in a CAT5e cable. So my question is, after I move in will i be able to pull the wall plate and use the other 6 wires for an RJ-45 port to run a wired network off of? I hope I am clear with that... thanks in advance for the help.

Question again is: Can you run a data network and phone off of a single CAT5e run?

And if so, can you point me to some of the wiring diagrams that will show me what wires to use etc? Thanks!

steve

Hi all, I am currently having a home built and had a question about the CAT5e wiring being installed. I have each room pulled with a CAT5e wire back to a central location in the house. This is what the builder did for the phones. I know that phones only use 2 wires of the 8 in a CAT5e cable. So my question is, after I move in will i be able to pull the wall plate and use the other 6 wires for an RJ-45 port to run a wired network off of? I hope I am clear with that... thanks in advance for the help.

Question again is: Can you run a data network and phone off of a single CAT5e run?

And if so, can you point me to some of the wiring diagrams that will show me what wires to use etc? Thanks!

steve

In theory this can be done. For a wiring diagram of which pairs to use for 10mbit or 100mbit ethernet look at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Ethernet

The above wiki recommends using the orange and green pairs for ethernet. You can then use the standard blue pair for your phone line and have the brown pair left over for future expansion or a second phone line.

You might see some interference when the phone rings, but since that happens rarely it probably won't hurt.

Also, gigabit ethernet is out of question since it uses all four pairs on the cat5e cable.

As stated above it will work but if the walls have not been closed in yet I would recomend having more wires pulled 1 to each location atleast for each type of media. You are very much limiting yourself for future network capabilities. You should have a minimum of 1 cat 5 for voice,1cat 5e for data and 1 quad sheild RG6 for CATV at each location.

Thanks for the reply and the link... I really need to start consulting wiki more before I post. :) thanks again.

Any other comments from folks that have done this before?

It sucks and it's a pain it the @$$.

Having built my home 10 years ago and only having a single CAT 5 line for phone pulled to those rooms I thought needed a phone jack and a number of rooms with cable - I would follow the_cable_guys recommendation above if you can. Probably since these posts are dated 12/06 you are well past than point.

Given that, I am wondering what to do for my situation of only having a single cat5 line going to various rooms that currently only have phone jacks. I could take the single CAT 5 line and use one pair for phone and 2 pair for data. Knowing that this is not recommended but in practice seems to work and that your data line may get some interference when the phone rings due to higher voltage of the ring.

Currently the CAT5 line from each jack are routed to a telephone line splitter in my heated attached garage. I also have cable splitter located nearby with cable going to various rooms as well.

I was thinking I would replace these splitters with an integrated phone/cable/data panel and replace the RJ11 phone jacks with a RJ11/RJ45 wall jack.

What I don't understand is if I did this would I keep my wireless router in my office which is above the garage. If I did would I just connect one port off my router to the network via the new RJ45/R11 wall jack in or do I somehow place all that in the integrated panel?

Utlimately I want to have a hard wire connection to my home theater/family room so that I can have a switch there and connect up a Networked Media Player (that is high def capable) and stream plus it would be nice to have a wired ethernet connection in other rooms in the house.

The other option is to keep the current CAT5 phone lines dedicated to telephone and instead run a seperate CAT5e cable from my office to the garage integrated panel and I would then have a dedicated CAT5e from my office to the panel. I could then put a RJ45 jack in the theater room connect from there back to the panel. (the office is above the garage and the garage is next to the home theater room).

Also for other rooms in the house that have the CAT5 cable where I don't need a wired phone I could replace that with a RJ45 jack and have a wired ethernet connection there.

Thus I could have gigbit connection at these points. Ultimately that would be nice for streaming HD to a networked high definition media player or connect to a NAS or networked storage drive.

I apologize in advance for the long winded post and my lack of knowledge in this area.

Your thinking is pretty much spot on.

It really doesn't matter where you put the wireless router. You could put it in either the garage or the office. I would probably go with the office because it is more secure and you might get slightly better coverage because it is elevated. But it could work in either location.

You could definitely replace the splitters with a dedicated phone/cable/data panel if you wanted to. It doesn't seem like there is a real reason to replace the cable splitters, but if you just want to get it all in one panel that is a good enough reason I guess.

You can certainly run more Cat5e drops. They really are not hard to do as long as you have access to either the attic or a crawl space. So there are probably areas in you house that you can access from one of those. Of course there are probably areas that you will not be able to access and just have to live with what you have.

As long as your phone lines have been "home run" back to this phone splitter and are not run in series, then you can certainly swap a phone line for a data line by changing it in the panel (unterminating it from the phone system and hooking it up to your data system) and changing the plug to a RJ45 plug.

Have you given any thought to running a Cat6 line instead of a Cat5e line? As a Cat6 is designed for faster speeds.

thanks sic0048 (and yes all phone lines are home run back to the splitter)

yes, I am also investigating using CAT6A instead of CAT6 as i understand it will be capable of 10gig if and when that becomes available - I know some of the pre -N routers like D-link xtreme n have gigabit ethernet ports now. The cool part is that even though I live in Fairfield, Iowa, (the middle of nowhere) the local telephone company (www.lisco.com) just got a grant to put optical fiber into the whole town and my home is scheduled to have fiber before the end of the year - per my friend who is responsible for their program we will have gig"e" both ways and very few places in the US presently have this...

C6A is great - if you can afford the price, and are willing to spend it.

The technology is out there, but the problem is that the 10G switching equipment is so expensive, even enterprises can't afford it..

You can do gigabit ethernet with C5e.. don't need augmented to do it.

I sell 10G solutions to enterprises for a living - cable is $150+/m, jacks are $7-10+ ea, and patch cords are outrageous.

Just some things to think about..

thanks sic0048 (and yes all phone (http://www.voipreview.org) lines are home run back to the splitter)

yes, I am also investigating using CAT6A instead of CAT6 as i understand it will be capable of 10gig if and when that becomes available - I know some of the pre -N routers like D-link xtreme n have gigabit ethernet ports now. The cool part is that even though I live in Fairfield, Iowa, (the middle of nowhere) the local telephone company just got a grant to put optical fiber into the whole town and my home is scheduled to have fiber before the end of the year - per my friend who is responsible for their program we will have gig"e" both ways and very few places in the US presently have this...

Is CAT6A the way to go. I'd like to hear some follow up on this thread.

Veteran VoIP USER

Littelfuse has a new article on ESD protection of ethernet datalines covering how suppressors with high capacitance can affect the data stream by distorting the data waveforms. Thought it might be useful.