Great article Danny. I could have used this info about a year ago. My parents were having a workshop built in their backyard and I ran 2 RG6, 2 Cat5, and 2 Cat3 cables from the house. I also used the leviton plugs and they were great. One question, I’m a little confused on how everything works in your wiring closet (i.e. the phone system). If you get a chance I would love to see an article showing off your wiring closet and how everything is set up and what does what. That’s not asking too much is it? :) Great job on the site.

Brian

Brian,

Glad you enjoyed this article. I plan on posting more about my structured wiring setup in more detail soon.

Danny

Danny,
You may also want to add a blurb about a toner or line tester. They were very handy when I cabled my house (fiber and copper) and I had long runs I did not want to do again.

Brad,

I agree with you, that’s why I think it is a must for builders to stay up to date. Personally, I wouldn’t want a builder that’s not keeping up with codes and trends building my house.

As for the LV being to close to the outlets. The boxes I have are designed for LV and power in the same box (or that’s how they are marketed). It is isolated from the power box, the area where the LV wire is just a ring opening. As for the 1’ rule… I have read about this too… but from my own personal tests (non scientific), I get gigabit speeds without any noticable dropout in my current setup. Again, I only have 8 gigabit ports the rest are 100Mbps. In commercial enviroments I would recommend following the 1’ rule, but in the home, we don’t have all the RF/Lighting/Power/etc issues commercial enviroments do.

Thanks for the input!
Danny

Brad,

As much as I love wireless, I’d choose a wired system over a wireless one any day. I really don’t want to have any more signals passing thru my families bodies than is necessary. Also, I don’t have to worry about implementing extra security issues. I’m weird this way. I wish wireless would be only used for person detection, control, low-bandwidth stuff… not for high-bandwidth intensive applications. But we know that wireless is here to stay because of the difficulty to properly wire and retrofit homes.

Danny

My only comment is that the B standard is more popular than A and therefore others should use this one…

Hey there,
I did the same thing, since the house I bought only had one cat-5 to each room. I don’t know where you got your colors, because I didn’t have to do a crazy switch-a-round at the patch panel. I just punched down the two ethernet pairs that had data: using A, orange to orange, o/white to o/white, and green appropriately. Phone was blue to green, and b/white to red. P.S. don’t worry about cat 7. Waste o’ money unless you need 10-gig ethernet.

I have a question…I know that minimum cable length to avoid problems with 10/100 ethernet should be at least 3ft. My question is, does the wiring in the wall count? I want to know because I am going to be making patch cables from the wall mount to my router and to each computer in each room.

Thanks for your help…

I have one question:
1. why is the Orange pair puched in the Blue slot on the patch board?

Tran,

The orange pair is punched on the blue slot of the patch board because that is where the pins I needed were. The orange and green colors line up correctly on the plug, but because I’m using the unused pairs from the CAT5 ethernet connection as telephone, the colors on the patch board don’t jive. No biggy, unless that really bothers you.

NOTE: Or it could be that I followed the T-568A on the plugs and the patch board is T-568B… I’d need to look at it again to determine that… but like I stated above, it doesn’t matter.

Danny

Thanks. I am just curious. According to the picture above, you are using Leviton Cat5e expansion board. Leviton configures its boards in T-568A standard. Thus the plugs and printed board should be “jive”.
BTW, I agree with you that signal blinds color, and it works, right.

Tran,

I will look into it this weekend… I can’t remember exactly why I did it that way, but I will post why as soon as I look at it again.

Danny

I’m a bit confused by the picture of the punched-down CAT5e connector. In the text you mention “…Green to Green, White/Green to White Green, Orange to Orange, and White-Orange to White Orange…” however the picture appears to show Orange and White-Orange reversed, so that the Orange wire is going to the White-Orange punch-down on the left. I’m I not seeing this correctly?

Jason,

Thanks for the kind words, I’ll triple check my setup again and verify what I posted is valid and easy to understand. I’ve been a bit busy to respond to the previous posts as well. I’m glad you got your setup to work and are enjoying the speeds that a wireless system can’t currently provide!

My Best,
Danny

my appartment is wired with 4 pairs cable and each outlet use the pair orange/white for the phone line.
my question is can I use the next 3 pairs for my rj 45 and how to select the right pins with the 3 pairs left.

Thanks

You can run a 10/100 network only using 2 pair? In a “normal” wiring job, what in god’s name are the other two pair there for? just redundancey? Thanks for this trick.

Thanks for the tip - this worked out great for my new house, that unfortunately, I didn’t get to wire before buying. I did find that for the cat5e punchdown, I had to terminate orange to orange and white orange to white orange, instead of orange to blue, white orange to white blue as stated in the article. Not sure what is different about my setup, as I followed the same T-568A standard and used standard 1’ patch cables to connect to the switch. But hey, it’s working for me.

How do you keep the high voltage of the phone lines from interfering with the data lines of same cable? I’ve been reading much to the avoidance of this. How did you make it work?

Al S.

I haven’t had any issues with the power from phone lines. The cable does become derated as a true Cat5e network cable. However, I have not had any problems using it in this way.

Danny

Hi; I am about to wire my house with phone lines and ethernet. I loved your article. However, I need more information on what is going on in your closet! I purchased a cisco switch for ethernet and a punch down junction for telephone. I just do not know how to put it all together using the same cat5 wire. Also, I would like do use two seperate jacks, one for rj45 & the other for rj11 so people can not accidently plug in the computer in a phone port. Any idea, suggestions or articled on how to wire both jack using the same cat 5.

Ok..I am remodling my house and I am totally confused I bought these Cat 41658-w phone/cable jacks…the wire in my house has 8 lines and these jacks only show 6 colors. I matched the colors I do have to the corresponding colors on the jack and Im left with the solid brown and the white/brown lines….and my phone doesnt work…what did I do wrong?

Hi, I am about to wire up my sat box and media center in the lounge room. My problem is the plugs are not colored just numbered. With the connector facing away all i have is left side starting at the top to bottom:- 3-3-4-4. and the right hand side from top to bottom: 6-6-5-5. i want to do straight through.

Danny,

Just found your site today while looking for information on Ethernet. I read this article, and had a question regarding your 1000Mb setup.

I have a D-Link 8 port gigabit switch installed in my structured media cabinet, with the same Leviton cat5e 6 port termination modules.

Why did you go directly to the switch, versus the termination module? I am currently having problems with my network, and am not getting 1000Mb speeds at all. I followed the -A wiring on all my outlets and on the termination module…does the cat5e module not support gigabit Ethernet?

Thanks!

I found your article very useful indeed. All is clear to me but one point, how do I wire my telephone jack connector…for example, is it blue, blue/white, brown, brown/white all in a row into the telephone connector, or in the middle, and from which side on the telephone connector do I start? By telephone connector, I mean at the junction box I have female connectors and you need to put a male connector on the end of the cat5e cable to plug into the female. so far I cant get it to work. The network works fine….I also metered the wires and I know the cat5e cable is good from source to destination….thanx…russ

Great article! A few follow up questions.

I am only hooking up a single phone line so I don’t need to steal two pairs - only one.

Should I hook the other THREE pairs up to the RJ45 jack in the normal color scheme?

Will this allow me to get Gig-E?

Thanx!

Thanks for sharing the info.
> Is there any changes to Network Properties required when only using 4 conductors for Ethernet?
> Will it work with any Hub/switch/router?

Does a box exist that would allow you to plug in the ethernet cables centrally so that you could toggle between ethernet and phone?

I have my phone service via my cable company and cable modem. I’m trying to setup a hardwire phonejack in each room of my house through one connection of my cable modem and phone punchdown in my patch closet. Can I jump out “jack to jack” with cat 3 wire? IE Bedroom to bedrooom to office to wire closet. Or do I have to run homeruns to the wire closet from each location?

Thanks!

Hi, I have two upstairs bedrooms which I’m trying to run ethernet through the phone jack. We have cable broadband internet. I was quoted by the builder for $550 to do the complete set up. He hasn’t showed up yet, but I had the phone lines run to the bedrooms. How much should I be looking at the parts and labor to convert to ethernet? Thanks
one 800frank @ hotm ail. co m

Hi Frank,

First you need to make sure that you have Cat5e cables, then you can use my method to use a single cable for both phone and network. If the builder put 4 conductor telephone cable you will need to rewire with Cat5e. Depending on the length, you could pull the cable out yourself and restring using the holes the builder provided… it’s very simple. You must have home-run lines (not daisy-chained) to a structured cabling box, again, I’m hoping that’s how the builder wired it up. I cannot give you pricing because everyones labor is different. However, For $550, I would expect the builder to have put two cat5e runs to each room…

Hope that helps,
Danny
Mavromatic.com

Hi, i’m a newby at this. why do you need both an ethernet switch and a cat5e termination module? can’t you just plug it straight in the module?

Good ideas and such, nice setup. But to simplify things why not just stick to the 568a or 568b standard on all cat5(5e) terminations and add network and telephone splitters as needed? That way no wall jacks need to be removed for modding. I can email you a diagram or two about what I mean with the splitters.

Hi JF
Please email the the telephone and network splitter diagram to me. Also what splitter products are needed?
Thanks
Miles
dsakal@earthlink.net

hey I am wondering if it is possible to take a house with a phoneline already running to a room and change it so its ethernet compatable without ripping apart the wall?

this is awesome. I used your write up to wire my house. However, I have no link lights when I plug in the patch cables to a computer. I do not have any pictures yet, but I read through the comments and there were some questions raised regarding switching the white/orange and the orange on the outlet jack. I did not see you answer to those questions. I am using a linksys 8 port 10/100 ethernet switch to connect 5 jacks to a gateway router. That device is a trandnet wireless router that will serve as the DHCP server for the internal network. I plan on turning off the wireless beacon since all the computers in the house have wired nic’s. I suppose my question is can you provide any feedback on some of the above questions? I tried moving the white/orange and orange to the same color punch down, but I still did not get link. any way I am curious as to my next roubleshooting step as well. Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Robert

Great article! I connected the cate5 jacks in each room as per your recommendation. However, I cannot get ethernet connection up. In my house all the cat5e wires are connected together in the equipement room using a simple matrix panel (g to g, w/g to w/g, o to o, w/o to w/o etc.) I thought that I could just connect router at one end and would be able to get ethernet connectivity on all ends (straight wires). It looks like I am wrong. Why do I need switch/panel? What kind of switch/panel do I need in my equipment room, where all the cat5e wires meet? Recommendations would be very helpful.

I love boys BTW ;)

Great article! My house was wired with Cat 5 wire for all the phones which were wire nutted in the service panel. When I moved in I had an electrician come out and wire one Ethernet for one room upstairs and one downstairs. I have since wanted to add an outlet for the kitchen, lower bedroom and the Dish receiver. I purchased a Leviton telephone bridge and the Cat 5 Module form Home Depot and installed it as described above except for the termination to the Cat 5 module. I didn’t cross match the wires and kept everything color matched at the module. It wouldn’t work any other way.

Thanks for the help,

Kent