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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."
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 ?)
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.