Phone line and cat5 cable

Dr. Nick

Hi,

Almost ready to move into a new build. I have cat5 cables running from TV and other locations running back to a central location. Can I split the line/cable so that I can plug the sky box into the wall as well as getting LAN through to the internet-enabled TV? Or do I need the phoneline to be seperate?
If not possible, is there a different/better way to do it? Might not get multiroom initially (although I have it at the moment), want to keep options open though.

Thanks.

Tea drinker

Not 100% sure what you mean, but I certainly wouldn't attempt to use a Cat5 cable split to use telephony at the same time.

Are you out of cable or space? Or just being lazy ;-)

homelink

As far as I'm aware, a standard Lan connection (100mbps) only requires 2 of the 4 pairs in a cat 5 cable & a phone line is one pair.But you will need two different sockets or a combo RJ 45 &RJ 11.

mjsmyth

A telephone connector (RJ11) will happily work with a socket designed for RJ45. It just slips in to the middle of the socket wit space either side.

Calibos

Thought about doing this myself but as Homelink says, there are only free twisted pairs if you are happy with 100mbit. If you want gigabit lan speeds on any given Cat5 cable then all the twisted pairs are used and thus none spare to run the phone over.

In my case, I am lucky in that I ran 2 Cat5 to every location. Even though I hoped to maintain two data links per room to save on 4 port switches in a given room if I had more than one network enabled device, ie I thought I might be able to run 2 data and 1 phone line over the two cat5 cables. Well, the aforementioned limitation meant I probably wouldn't bother trying to do that. I'd just dedicate 1 of the cat5 to phone and fit a switch in a given room if I had to. At least I still have the backup option should the cables be damaged. Say I discover 1 Cat5e isn't working. Maybe just 1 or two of the twisted pairs is damaged. I can switch the data over to the good cable and switch the phone over to the damaged cable assuming there is at least 1 good twisted pair undamaged.

I mean I didn't go in for the whole Cat6 for future proofing nor the running of 10- cables to each room...just in case but I sure as hell am glad I ran at least two cables to each location

I'm still educating myself with all this networking malarky so I can't be certain, but a gigabit switch can run some ports at gigabit speeds and others at 100mbit can it not? Its not like it defaults all ports to the lowest common denominator speeds. So assuming that the rooms that need a Phoneline for Sky boxes are rooms where you will only be steaming content to a streamer or an internet enabled TV, well then 100mbit speeds are enough. ie you can the same cable. Now if you wanted to run the phone over the same cable that is servicing a PC where you might want to be moving large files to/from over the network, well then 100mbit speeds might be a pain in the @rse and one would prefer gigabit speeds to quickly move the files around.

But as said, by Homelink, if you are happy with 100mbit, then yes you can run the phone over the same cable.

bk

Yes, you can run a phone line and 100mb ethernet over a single Cat5e cable.

I did exactly that for about a year without any problems *.

You only lose the ability to do Gigabit ethernet.

Two other points:

1) You only need the phone line for Sky if you are getting multiroom.

2) Another option, are these wireless phone line extenders, haven't used them myself, but supposedly work well with Sky:

http://maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?moduleno=97658

* I no longer need this setup, so I've switched to an all Gigabit ethernet setup now.

Calibos, yes, most gigabit ethernet switches should allow a mix of 100mb and 1000mb ports without the gigabit ports falling back to a slower speed. Of course both the sender and receiver need to be on a gigabit port with gigabit network cards to get gigabit speeds.

Dr. Nick

bk wrote: »

Yes, you can run a phone line and 100mb ethernet over a single Cat5e cable.


2) Another option, are these wireless phone line extenders, haven't used them myself, but supposedly work well with Sky:

http://maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?moduleno=97658

.

You've just reminded me that I have one of those somewhere (we've moved a few times recently :rolleyes:)
Might be an easier option. Will two of those work at the same time?

neilthefunkeone

yeah i use the orange and green pairs for ethernet and the plue pair for phone.. Happy days..

bk

Dr. Nick wrote: »

Will two of those work at the same time?

According to the FAQ on the maplin page, yes and you can also buy a single extender.

Calibos

LOL, this thread reminded my to check something down at our site this morning. I asked the sparks for 3 Cat5e to an area in the kitchen. 1 for Data, 1 for a Sky box and one for the uplink from the eircom master socket up to the attic to the Phone and Data patch panel where it gets routed back to all the rooms.

The fecker only put 2 in. So I'll actually be using 2 twisted pairs on one of the Cat5e for Phone. One pair will be the uplink to the attic and another pair on the same cable will be the downlonk for the Skybox. Thats going to complicate the cable termination on the Kitchen and attic end

bk

Calibos wrote: »

The fecker only put 2 in. So I'll actually be using 2 twisted pairs on one of the Cat5e for Phone. One pair will be the uplink to the attic and another pair on the same cable will be the downlonk for the Skybox. Thats going to complicate the cable termination on the Kitchen and attic end

Yup, you can stick up to 4 phone lines on a single cat5e cable. And yes, the wiring definitely gets interesting then.