Routing CAT5 wire through the house

Network cables have 4 twisted pair (of which only 4 strands are used) while the telephone cable has 2 twisted pair (of which only two strands are used). So in theory you can use a telephone cable to run a network over it! It also depends on cable quality but we won't go into build qualities!

The standard 2 bed build put 2 phone points in Living Room and a phone socket in the back bedroom. Of course the point in the bedroom is faced off with a blank plate, similar to the one beside the stairs in the Living Room.

I took the internal distributing spur from the eircom master socket (2 twisted pair), and wired it to a RJ45 socket - all this beside the eircom socket. The spur cable loops at the phone point at the opposite side of the room (beside the stairs) and continues then on up to the rear bedroom. Now I haven't cut the loop in the sitting room so I am guessing this is the route its taking.

So at the moment, there is a straight run from the eircom master to the rear bedroom. I have re-wired two network cables, crimped plugs and all, so the strands end up in the right order for the back of the routers. Hay presto, the router upstairs is on a static IP, different to the main router downstairs which does the DHCP for all the connected devices.

Where do you need your network point?

I know I was told that the cabling in the house would all be cat5 cabling which has since turned out to be a load of b.......

I've tried doing signal testing on the cabling in the house but it would appear that the cables do not appear to be fully connected... most likely the cables may all be coming out at some magic junction box that I am yet to find, but I must say that the "homeplug" system works better than expected tbh...

And if you want to make it even less intrusive you can even get the pass-thru variety which means that you wouldn't even lose out on a socket in the room. And to expand your network, just add another plug and you're done...

I'm getting approx 135Mbps between the front and back room which is more than plenty for what I want to do (and faster than the wireless) plus I don't have to worry about losing the network connection when the microwave is turned on...

do the home plug system work on different rings? Kitchen ring main is seperate to rest of house.

Does you modem support WDS? You can borrow a router from me if you wish to test it.

keith123 wrote: »

Sorry to ask the obvious but how do you route these cables thru the points in the house especially if they go upstairs?

It depends on whether or not you mind seeing cables or not?

if you don't want to see them, then you are going to have to chase the cables under the floor (which means possibly lifting the floor up, in parts), up the walls, and through the ceilings. Alot of work if your only doing one or two points.

The other way would just be to chase the cable along the skirting board, up the door frame etc etc, untill you get to where you want to go. You will have to drill through walls in parts. You can use small self adhesive conduit to hide the cables in parts if you need to.

Hope this helps.

Would take me too long to type this up in detail Keith so give me a shout end of the week or the weekend, I was lucky enough to see our place before the walls went up and we had it wired for extra points etc... throughout.

re: CAT5 - I use Powerline adapters myself, (similar to homeplugs) 4 of them in use at the moment, you can try out a pair if you want. They work well and are not affected by using them across different rings in the house.

That was my point exactly