New House - wiring Q's

[UThomas]

Ok, I just bought my first house. Yea! Its from 1998 and in the master bedroom closet it appears there is a home run box where the whole house is wired to. So here is the deal - it has 2 boxes in there (see pic)

http://home.roadrunner.com/~th...hell/Pics/Home_Run.jpg

Are these switches? Do they handle data?

It appears that all the coax in the house is run in here but the cable guy just plugged the master line into a 3-1 splitter just for the rooms in the house with TV's and left the rest instead of splitting it and plugging it into the "IN" in the center of each box so that all the coax jacks are live.

For the rest it appears to be setup for data lines - all Cat 5. But the line in is used on both boxes (!?) Did the phone company wire that? If so, why use all 8 wires instead of just 2? All the jacks in the house are RJ45 but the previous owner had phones plugged in. I'd like to run gigabit ethernet (or at least 100BT) and I'm thinking I have to either:

1) crimp an RJ45 jack on all the dozen wires and plug them into a switch/router or...
2) connect the line outs on the boxes to a switch/router. Will the boxes then route the traffic, and at what speed?

Any guidance you can provide would be great...

Thanks!

Thomas

 

[skyking]

look at the C0214 combo module
You have the AMP version, it only splits out the phone signal, and splits the coax.
You are exactly right, you can terminate those cables and hook it up to a switch. You'll only get 10/100 speeds, but that is not bad for a little bit of work.

Don't crimp any ends, do it right the first time.
Use a 12 port cat5 patch panel
and use a Punchdown tool.
Connect to your switch using premade patch cables.

That stuff totals about $50 and shipping. The punchdown tools is yours to keep

You would want to leave a few of the jacks as phone jacks.

 

[UThomas]

Thanks! 2 questions:

1) The coax is not on the AMP splitter but would work fine there?

2) I won't have 1000BT because it is Cat5 and not Cat5E? What will happen if I use gigabit NIC's and a gigabit switch/router (all of which I already have)? Does it downgrade the speed based on the cable or does it cause packets to drop?

Thanks,

Thomas

 

[amdskip]

Try the coax on the AMP and see what happens. I think it should work.

Yes your gig equipment will downgrade to 10/100. The cable has to be 5e or 6 for gig.

 

[kevnich2]

I can answer 1 of your questions. You will not have gig speeds with cat5, the link will just be downgraded to 100mb. This is how I found a Cat5 patch cable in my batch on accident. I personally haven't seen packet loss though