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Rewiring Your Home Phone System?
the_2nd_coming asks: "Back when I moved into my house, the phone system was in need of immediate upgrade. The house was built in 1964, and it still had the original spaghetti phone lines running through the walls. The phone jacks were in odd places, and to top it all off, the line would melt after I would dial up to my ISP. I took immediate and drastic action. I pulled all the phone wires out of the walls, patched over the holes where the jacks use to be, and started drilling. I bought 2000 feet of Cat5 (I was going to be putting in a home network in the future). A day later, I was cursing and bitching because the old phone system used a 3 screw junction box to connect the house to the phone company, making it very difficult to have multiple jacks.What is the best way to rewire my phone system so that adding an extra 2 or 3 jacks would not be such a chore?"
"I eventually got all the wires hooked up, but very poorly due to the shoddy junction box. Since then I have added a phone jack, and will be adding 2 more in preparation for DirecTV service. My problem is that I did not set up the system to be expandable: just adding one jack was a hack job, and with 2 more on the way I have decided it is time to rewire this system with expandability in mind. I have looked around at Home Depot and Radio Shack, but all their solutions seem sub-par."
They can upgrade the connection to your home, providing you with a great place to start!
NarratorDan
"If you're not confused by quantum mechanics, you really don't understand it." - Niels Bohr
Note that those thee terminals belong to the phone co!
In my last house (built 1955) I had similar problems. The wiring was crumbling, and I was getting a lot of noise and cross-talk between my two lines and solved most of my problems just by calling my phone co. and having them come out and install a modern demarcation point with capacity for 8 lines and modular jacks on my side of the demarc for debugging. I replaced all the wiring with Cat5, just in case, and this helped enormously.
Note that my current house (built 2001) isn't much better. Yes it has a modern demarc, but the builder skimped on the internal wiring and it's still wired the old fashioned way with only one pair of wires going to each phone line daisy-chained to other outlets. The house was "prewired" with Cat5 and RG6 but was not designed for flexibility as some of the outlets are in the wrong place for me, or don't have all the right connections. (e.g. I wanted a second RG6 and phone line for my DirecTV Tivo, but have so far been unable to find a way to route the wires there.My next house will have conduit in the walls
Balamthe line would melt after I would dial up to my ISP.
Forget rewireing until you get your modem looked at. It shouldn't by pumping out nearly enough amps to do that.
-- MarkusQ
You'll probably want to use a 66 block. Just attach the top set to the junction box, and punch as many lines as you have space for (often 24, so up to 23 lines). You can also use various jack schemes to produce a "patch panel", or you can use an actual patch panel, but it's simplest and cleanest to use a 66 block (or a 110 block, depending on your needs, but probably a 66 block), especially if you plan on making the connections semi-permanent and don't expect to change them frequently.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
On block "B", in the forth row, I punched down every jack in the house. I labelled every pair, and had a map of where they were in the house.
You then run patch cables from column 4 block "A", to column 1 block "B", and use the metal clips to complete the circut. Thus any time I wanted to change out wires, all it took was a small run of wire from block A to block B. The original wires from the phone company or to the jack, never had to be touched to manipulate the system. You want to get the wires from the phone company, and the wires from the jack so you, never ever touch them. It makes trouble shooting lots easier, and you'll never run out of cable.
I might have introduced some line noise due to the way I duplicated the lines on block A, but I don't use dialup, so that was never an issue.
Now, if you want to get really fancy, wire each cat 5 cable into a patch panel. Thus you can put phone, or ethernet to any jack in your home. Now you can skip block "B" (the patch panel acts like the punch down block). Now, use row 4 of punchdown block A, and take phone jacks straight to the patch panel. You'll have eight copies of each line to distribute around the house as you see fit. When you want to move a line, just change the port it's plugged into on the patch panel. Unless you do phone, and network, this is really overkill. Just running the punchdown blocks will work great.
I figure that if the phone company uses punch down blocks, they are good enough for me. The tools are kinda expensive ($50-80 for a punch down tool, and the heads you'll need to do it). The punchdown blocks themselves are dirt cheap, like $8 bucks a piece. The patch panels are pretty expensive.
Kirby
You can cut new rectangular holes into the wall, just smaller than the size of the boxes. These boxes can expand to the size of the hole.
Of course, run wire up/down first, then cut, then mount the expandable box. Ask the person at the hardware store for more info. (Level the rectangular holes, first.)
You could cap off or cover up the 1964 era boxes, or leave them alone.
If you don't want to spend the $$ on a "real" 110 punchdown tool you can get a cheap (~$3) plastic one and cut the wires with diagonal cutters.
If you have a crawl-space you can use a trick an electrician friend showed me. Cut the bottom part off of a bunch of coathangers so you have a long straight piece of stiff wire. Find the studs on either side of the spot where you want to mount the jack then chuck a piece of the coathanger wire into a drill and drill right in the corner of your baseboard or just above the baseboard - whichever works well for you. When you go to the crawlspace you can find the wires sticking down and check to see if there are any obstructions to drilling then use the wire as a locator to drill up into the wall space. It's easy and you are far less likely to drill through a hardwood floor than if you tried measuring the locations.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
I thought you said you went to the local... oh nevermind.
I live in a rental property (can't drill holes or rewire), but my idea works for me. It also worked when I was living with my parents.
/. will now appear in XXX search engine results. Double adapters have other meanings. ;-)
To get more phone jacks, have you considered using double adapters (one telephone socket becomes two)? This is very similar to a double adapter at a power socket. Adapters are very cheap and reliable.
Use two or three double adapters near the junction box. And the new wires you plug into the double adapters can be wired through the walls/roof/floor to the location where you need access.
It's pretty easy - in Australia there are 4 wires, however only two are ever used.
I do fear that
Oh yeah, right....
I've done this tens of times. Drill away. Just make sure they are small holes...nobody, NOBODY, will notice.
If all you have is an old-style connection on your house, call up your telco's repair line and request that they replace it with a new network access box. The new box will have a wonderland of easy-to-wire connection options for your extension needs.
I've done this a half dozen times (rentals, and now my own house) and they've always prompty replaced the equipment at no cost. Plus the linemen are usually quite friendly and if you show some interest and/or knowledge in phone wiring, they're usually delighted to give you free advice about setting up a your home runs and planning out your extensions. They might even slip you some equipment for the inside wiring.
This is a great resource for many kinds of in-home wiring.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
"The house was "prewired" with Cat5 and RG6 but was not designed for flexibility as some of the outlets are in the wrong place for me, or don't have all the right connections. (e.g. I wanted a second RG6 and phone line for my DirecTV Tivo, but have so far been unable to find a way to route the wires there.[1]"
WHAT!? Well looks like no VoIP for you mister.
[1] Try one of those extention outlets. They were made for your kind of situation. And one of these for wireless transmission of your Tivo signal.
Now there's a question for another Ask Slashdot -- is anybody actually using gigabit ethernet? I don't mean they have the hardware installed, I mean they are actually doing things where that extra bandwidth makes any difference. I suppose there must be some video networking app that would need it, but how many people have the necessary hardware or expertise? Not enough to buy all the gigbit NICs I see for sale at CompUSA.
As someone who has done a bunch of wiring for phones, alarm systems, and networks I can answer this question.
For phones CAT5 is fine, but CAT3 is cheaper and just as good. Run all the wires directly from the Telephone company's network interface box to the outlet. Don't splice into them if it can be avoided.
CAT5 has 8 wires (4 pairs). The Blue pair is usually line 1, the orange pair line 2.
The phone company will install a new network interface box if you order more phone lines (at least BellSouth will). The new boxes have nice little gadgets on them that require no tools to crimp a wire pair into place. Just slip in the wire pairs and close it with your thumb.
The only difficult part is getting the wire down the walls. Inside walls are usually not insulated and therefore easier to work with. Drill a hole in the top-plate above the area you want to install the jack. Feed the wire down the wall. Have someone downstairs listening to make sure the wire made it all the way down the wall before cutting a hole for the jack. Sometimes there are 2x4 braces which block the wire from going all the way down.
You could do like the phone company generally does and use thin 4 conductor wire and staple it along the base boards, but it looks shoddy and CAT5 would look horrible.
You could probably also go to a mom-and-pop alarm installation company and ask one of the installers what he'd charge you to run the wire as a side job. You could probably get it done for $150.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
You already ripped out the old cables. Did you do that just because you like using the phrase "fish tape"? Even if they were routed the old standard way - daisy-chained from jack to jack, if they could be pulled out, they were still useful.
Really, the daisy chain is the telephonically-correct way to wire. If you do a star topology, like they did in my house, it's a big impedence mismatch. Of course, the fact that it's ok to have multiple unknown ringer equivalencies on the line means there's some leeway.
Anyway, run the CatV or whatever from where you have signal to where you want it. Terminate it where you want it, and connect the other end to the signal source. Then, plug in the equipment you want on the phone system (at the aforementioned terminations). Note: There are several types of wall terminations. The only one's I've seen are screw terminal and insulation-piercing quick-installs. For POTS, the screws are better. If you're putting RJ45s all around, so each jack might be phone or ethernet, the quick-installs are actually a bit better for a while (the drier you climate, the longer that is). Note: You can use one CatV to carry ethernet AND up to two POTS signals. The blue and Brown pairs are dead in standard wiring, so you might as well split them out and make them available for other purposes. I wouldn't recommend it for 1000bT (in some implementations, all 4 pairs are used anyway), but for a home 10 or 100 network, it's just good economic sense. Radio Shack carries a dual-jack outlet - RJ45 & RJ-11 (though an RJ-11 plug will work just fine in an RJ-45 jack). Of course, if you're doing the whole house, you're probably buying from a real supplier(it took me 2 trips a week apart to get two of those wall-plates).
WARNING! If you accidently type in "goatsex" instead of "phone wiring home", you may be in for a shock!
Just get a cell phone, and don't worry about the wiring. Wireless router too, then you don't have to worry about the cat5 for your local network :)
THe best way is to make a central 'phone closet'. Run a 6pr cable from the demarc to this closet This will give you a maximum of 6 incoming lines before you have to run more. Punch that down to one 66 block. Run new cables from each jack to the phone closet and puch them down to another block. Use splice wire to go between the two blocks using the non-cutting side of the punch tool to create loops.
Wiring Code:
for 66 blocks
(primary in bold)
Pr 1:White Blue | Blue White
Pr 2:White Orange | Orange white
Pr 3:White Green | Green White
Pr 4:White Brown | Brown White
Pr 5:White Slate | Slate White
Pr 6:Red Blue | Blue Red
for 'biscuit' jacks and wall plates
Wire from Cable | Wire on Jack
White/Blue | Green
Blue/White | Red
White/Orange | Black
Orange/White | Yellow
White/Green | White
Green/White | Blue
When it comes to wiring the jacks, only the green/red wires are really necessary. These wires carry the dialtone that everything uses. The Black/Yellow wires are for a seccond line, or data as in the case of a phone system. You will fid black/yellow hooked up more commonly on houses with two lines. This is how they make two line phones that have only one cord. Just as a suggestion, wire them all up as if you were putting two phone lines everywhere. This will make it easier if you decide to go to a phone system with extensions, etc. (Psst.. if you do go to a phone system, get an Avaya/Lucent/whatever their name is Phone system called the Partner system. It's one of a rare few that you can connect a home type telephone/cordless/modem up to and use without additional hardware. You can get them for good prices on Ebay.)
Hope this helps
Partnership for an idiot free America!
If you don't want to do the wiring yourself, just ask the phone guys for a reccomendation of a guy to do it off hours...they'll say "Oh, we can't reccomend someone...", then you say, I was hoping one of your retired buddies could come ou t and make a few bucks...and so forth. Or one of them will pull you aside to tell you to either screw off or to set up a time on the weekend to come out.
For the house, run cat5 to a few places, wireless the rest and save a bit of time, money and elbox grease. It sounds like you did the right thing by ripping out the old wiring, we had the same problems on some old lines in our place (built in 1936) and a modern demarc will allow you to hook up a ton of lines, you can go the 110 route if you like, but it seems sort of a hassle.
Chris
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
I buy all my keystone jacks, faceplates, and supplies from 9thtee.com. If you are going to do this sort of work don't do anything but keystone jacks with punchdown terminals on them. You should never turn screws or strip cable unless it's for banana jacks, F connectors, or RCA jacks.
Kris
Kriston
The latest trend for new apartments / houses is to install a home exchange type arrangement. These are esentially an rj45 type patch closet in a pre fabricated box. Star wire all you outlets from this and terminate you incoming line(s) to into the box. This will give you maximum flexability as you can put a small switch in the box and allocate network and phone resources around the house as you see fit. btw. Cat5e is the mimium cable i would bother with because, you dont wan't to have to do it twice.
Cheers
EnempE
(who forgot what password ?)
But what about wireless? Honestly as someone who is almost 100% wired I have to say if I had the money I would get rid of as many as possible.
Quack, quack.
Good place to find some stuff like that is blackbox.com. They have a lot of pretty decent diagrams and layouts and such, and even some stuff on how to do the proper wiring.
When I've done this type of thing, CAT5 is the way to go, and make sure to use the same color code (placement of the wires when putting together the jacks and blocks), otherwise you could have some fun on your hands. The most common today that I have seen is the standard 568-B. You'll notice it most easily when you are wiring jacks and they have the color code on the sides most of the time, and they will say in fine print which one is which.
Also, for running new cable to locations, what I have found also sometimes (not always) works is when removing the old cable, tie to the end the new cable and a pull string (usually a nylon type string) so that if ever in the future, you can pull more or new cable much easier.
Rewired the whole house (50 years old). I put RJ45 sockets in various rooms, and CAT5 from them to where the fuse box is. Bought a 19" rack case from a music shop, and managed to get a 19" RJ45 patch bay from work that they were going to throw out.
So far, so good. Connecting a hub or switch in is easy, but the question is about the telephone, so here's what I did: I got ISDN. ISDN devices use RJ45 connectors too! They only need 4 of the 8 strands in CAT5, and if you move a phone you can repatch the socket and use it for a computer.
ISDN is a bus system, so unlike ethernet, you can stick a splitter in and plug multiple devices into one socket - same as you would do with power. You can chain sockets together too if you like. The downside is that you need ISDN capable devices. It is possible to get converters for analogue devices, but that might mean you can't use some of the ISDN advanced functionality.
ISDN modems (PCI cards) are well supported on a number of operating systems, including Linux (but check that the chipset is supported). Passive cards are quite cheap now too. You can use your computer as a fax and answering machine. Because it's ISDN, you can have your fax on a different number. (You can tell ISDN devices which numbers not to ignore.)
Of course, this is all dependant on your telephone company offering ISDN as a service. You don't need different physical cables to your home, but they must have an ISDN capable exchange. Depending where you are, ISDN might be unreasonably expensive too. It's not here (Germany); I have an ISDN/DSL combination. Being able to use two different phones AND have Internet all at the same time is useful is you have a family!
I don't know about alternative solutions with cable TV and phone together. Talk to your phone company and other providers to see what they offer.
-- Steve
Just by the by, the problem with splitting satellite cables is that the cable needs to carry a DC (Dish) or low frequency (DTV) signal back to the LNB to select which orbital position/transponder your channel is on.
Dish is pretty simple and you can pretty much put a switch anywhere you want, and the latest receivers have built in switches so you would only need one wire anyhow.
DTV is more complicated. To select all possible combinations from a 3 orbital position dish, you need a minimum of 4 wires at the point where you put the switch. For 1 orbital position dishes there are products that will "stack" two signals on one wire and "destack" them later. Sonora Design. Unfortunately I switched from Dish to DTV for some internationals channels and the TiVo, so I'm stuck.
These also don't help the fact that there is no phone jack there. ;-(
BalamThis may be slightly off topic, but so far, almost all of the postings offer *excellent* suggestions to "wire" the entire house on some form or another, but what about a "wireless" solution?
Has anyone used any of the current multi-handset wirless phones? My brother-in-law has a Sony cordless phone setup that has a base station that he has centrally located (from which you can answer and dial with a handset) with two wireless handsets, one that he uses "upstairs" and one that he uses "downstairs". Adding an aother extension is a simple matter of just purchasing an additional handset.
His phone has some excellent features and seems to work well. The only problems are the price (these systems tend to be expensive) and he sometimes has some conflicts with his 802.11b WiFi LAN. He did upgrade to 802.11g and things don't seem to conflict anymore.
Anyone have any experience with these?
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
that's a good question indeed. good luck buddy.
This assumes that you want to do both ethernet and telephone.
4 40 23
This wiring distribution block uses 110 connectors and has 4 punchdowns for cat5 to rj45s (for ethernet) and has 10 punchdowns that are all wired together (for telephone). I would probably have more like 6 and 6 but whatever.
Milestek also has good pricing on rj11, rj45, and coax wall plates & connectors, as well as whatever tools you'll need. Their cable prices are a bit high, as are most of their computer equipment prices.
http://www.milestek.com/shop/product.asp?id=50-
There's a solution to every problem...except yours:)
A few years ago, I would have been taking notes on this thread to forge ahead with a solid cable solution. However, things have improved quite a bit in the wireless world. I will never go back from wireless! If you are a hardware hobbyist who loves things like stringing cable, drilling holes, putting in boxes, etc, by all means setup an all cable home network. To me, the ability to use the laptop or phone from the back porch, sofa, bed, wherever is almost priceless, as is the extra time with the family I saved in network setup. I have a couple of ideas that are little outside the box:
First, do you use DSL or need the phone line for anything other than phone service? If no, have you thought about bumping up your mobile minutes a notch and dumping the landline altogether?
If you need the landline, pay the telco to upgrade to a modern connection to the demarc. Now, run one phone line to a 5.8 GHz phone base station and add the satellite cordless phones you need. I would not go 2.4GHz because it often really does interfere with 802.11x network transmission.
Now, regarding data: Run another connection from the service provider demarc to your DSL/cable/POTS modem (sorry, I cannot speak for satellite) into a combo RJ-45/802.11g wireless router that lives near your server(s). All non-servers will do just fine on 802.11g.
I only run one server box from home. I would guess most people run no more than one. For them, this is a great solution -- minimal wire pulling, maximal flexibility. All your phones and wireless clients can live anywhere in your home, and can be rearranged on a whim without worrying where you punched the box for the jack.
Best wishes.
Do you know of any other these multiswitches that DOESN'T require a diplexer at the output end to split the antenna/cable from the satelite. I was thinking of using one of these ( and I would be only using the satelite inputs; no cable/antenna ), but that drawback is a major PITA.
You don't need a diplexer at the receiver end unless you want to get that antenna signal off the wire. You can feed the combined sat+antenna signal into a receiver with no ill effects whatsoever. The sat receiver isn't tuning the low band antenna stuff, and so it's irrelevant to the receiver. The reason for the diplexer is to a) split the cable and b) block the high frequency satellite stuff from hitting your television, because it could be bad for the TV tuner. The satellite's tuner doesn't care.
And if you have no antenna hooked up to the switch, it's irrelevant anyway.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Actually, let me rephrase part of that.. The purpose of the diplexer is to block the DC current from the receiver from hitting your TV tuner. Most diplexers don't block the frequencies from hitting the tuner (although they can, I guess), they just block the DC power, because that definitely would be bad for the TV tuner. If it wasn't for that DC power signal, you could use a normal splitter and it would work just fine, most likely.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
- You want more lines than the current box allows (second phone, SDSL, etc)
- The current box doesn't have a place for you to tap off of to check the lines (ie, if you can't get a dial tone from that point, it's the LEC's problem, not yours)
- older, sub standard wiring (mine had a football [markings of a cable splice]) already on the line
- You're getting below 4800 bps on your modem
I'm sure there are others, too, but those are the ones I can think of.I bought my house, and was scheduled for an install before the 2000 Verizon strike -- when the guy came out, he saw that I had an old box (1930's home), I told him I was planning on getting a DSL line (I'm maybe 500 yards from the CO), and there were signs that the line had been spiced at least once before --
He said this was his territory, and he'd rather fix it up now, rather than have to come back later, so got a second guy to come down and direct traffic around him while he climbed the pole. He did a great job.
Although, when my SDSL line came in, they put it on pair 6, not pair 2, like we were expecting, so the Covad folks spent a bit of time trying to debug, not realizing why they weren't getting signal.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.