Organizing Home Network Cables?

not-so Anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "A few years ago, while finishing our basement, we wired each room of our house with two CAT-5 and two RG-6 cables. All of the cables were run to a central place in the basement, with the intent of building a "cabinet" to house and better organize the cables. Well, it is time. As you can see from the pictures, it is a jumbled morass of spaghetti. So I'd like to get ideas from the Slashdot crowd as to how to finally organize this mess, build the cabinet, etc., etc. No doubt there are many other readers in a similar situation, wanting ideas for organizing all the communications/network cables in their home."

Comments

all you need

[gyratedotorg]

thats not too bad of a mess. id say all you need are:

1.) a small patch panel
2.) tie wraps

Re:Leviton is your friend

[wayne606]

I like the Leviton Cat5 plugs w/faceplates because I hate putting male connectors on the end of the cables. I always make mistakes in feeding in the wires into the tiny sockets... With the plugs you have plenty of room to clamp down the individual wires.

Here's another hint... Phones take 2 wires and 10baseT takes 4. So if all you have is one cat5 cable going to some obscure location in your house, and you don't need high bandwidth, you can get 1 ethernet connection and 2 phone lines. Useful...

Re:Leviton is your friend

[BrianRaker]

Actually, 100base-t requires the same 2 pair that 10base-t require. Only needs the orange and green pairs (1-2 and 3-6). Blue and brown are free for use in POTS, but I'm not sure about the crosstalk once a 90vAC current is put down the wire for the ringer on a POTS phone versus a 100base-t connection... >.>

Dryer Exhaust Hose = Great Conduit

[panker]

We had a large mass of cabling coming out of the ceiling at work similar to your pictures. We used dryer vent hose to hide it all. Of course now our rack looks like some deranged dryer exhausting itself into the ceiling, but you don't see any spaghetti. I guess you could use that downspout extender tubing stuff if you wanted it to be more rigid. Either way it's cheap!

Re:Leviton is your friend

[BrianRaker]

I believe that the $50 invested in a good crimper is worth the money. Besides, you'll have a couple bad crimps here and there, but after a while you'll get pretty damn good at it and maybe have a failure once every 100 or so crimps (my going rate right now). One of the most usefull skills I've learned was making a proper TIA-568B cable (what everyone calls Cat5 patch cable).

Add to that that you can make the enclosure look nice and professional looking by having little slack in the cables. Makes for a nice bragging piece to the non-networking initiated (ooo cables and blinkey lights!).

Which reminds me, I need to scour Graybar for more RJ48 connectors, my bag is looking rather lean.