Extra phone sockets affect broadband?

Dopey

Folks,

I plan to run phone cable to other rooms in the house. I am conscious of it adversely affecting my broadband. I have two questions.

1) Will it affect the line quality if I add an extra 20 foot of cable around the house?

2) What is the best way of splitting the cable?

I can cut the cable and put phone plugs on and use double adapters or maybe one of those little modules that looks like lego. Join the wires and screw them in.

Dopey

beller b

Dopey wrote:

Folks,

I plan to run phone cable to other rooms in the house. I am conscious of it adversely affecting my broadband. I have two questions.

1) Will it affect the line quality if I add an extra 20 foot of cable around the house?

2) What is the best way of splitting the cable?

I can cut the cable and put phone plugs on and use double adapters or maybe one of those little modules that looks like lego. Join the wires and screw them in.

Dopey

The cable has travelled between 1 & 5 km to you house so another 20m doesent make a blind bit of difference dispite what Eircoms excuse for engineers might tell you!!!!..connecting 2 or 3 extra points doesn't affect BB either, thought you do need to fit filters to any additional devices....

TimTim

Why bother fiddling with the socket? Just get one of those double/triple adapters and plug it into the phone socket of the filter, and then plug the wall socket into one of those.

Easy as pie.

beller b

Come to think of it A wireless router & cordless phone would be easier

incisor71

beller b wrote:

Connecting 2 or 3 extra points doesn't affect BB either, thought you do need to fit filters to any additional devices....

Two things to watch out for here:-

(1) The maximum number of devices - and hence microfilters - that you can attach to a phone line is four. This is primarily because of the small but non-negligible effect (a dampening or "muffling" effect if you like ) that each additional microfilter has on the phone line signal's waveshape.

(2) If you opt for the wiring route (at least it's not so easy to have someone outside the house eavesdrop your connection), make sure you use 4-core or 8-core twisted pair cabling (not dissimilar to the Ethernet CAT-5 cabling). Without the correct cabling, your phone line characteristics won't match those of your internal wiring, and you'll get all kinds of nasties in the form of reflections, which will cause loads of errors on your data stream.

Dopey

Thanks for the responses folks.

I am moving the phone sockets rather than adding many additional ones. I currently have two and I will probably end up with three.

One final question to incisor71. You mentioned getting 4 core twisted pair. I was going to use extension cable that I have in the house. How can I tell if it's 4 core twisted pair?

Thanks again,

Dopey

TimTim

If I'm thinking what he's thinking

Its the one with the four wires in the cable.

Although I don't know why you'd need the 4. I'm 99.999% all of the internal wiring in the house only has the 2 core cabling. The middle two cables are the most important.

Dopey

Cheers TimTim.

I guess you're right about the number of wires inside the cable. The existing cable has two wires. The extension cable I have has two wires. I can't imagine it being worse than what I have already.

But I could be wrong!

Dopey

incisor71

Dopey wrote:

Cheers TimTim.

The existing cable has two wires. The extension cable I have has two wires. I can't imagine it being worse than what I have already.

Quick Jargon buster:
Twisted pair - 2 insulated copper wires, twisted around each other along their length.
Core / conductor / wire - all mean the same thing.

It seems strange that there are only two wires inside the existing cable, unless it's a very old house - from my own experience, provision has been made for a number of years for at least two conductor pairs (i.e., four cores) , in case a second phone line should be required, or if conductors break inside the sheathing. When my parents were organising the wiring of their new house, I recommended that 8-core twisted be installed throughout, in case they needed second or even more lines at any of the telephone points in the house.

But if you have just two wires, as you say, it's perfectly ok to tap into the existing cable's connections and route the extension cable to wherever you want. In any case, make sure that you use a twisted pair within the extension cable, rather than randomly selecting wires from the cable.

(How to pick out a twisted pair? The colour coding of one of the wires in the pair is a solid colour with a thin white line running along its length, and the colour of its comrade is the exact opposite - white, with a thin coloured line running along its length.)

Hope this helps.