How best to use existing structured wiring

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 01, 2004 Posts: 6

I have kind of an odd setup for existing home wiring and I getting Vonage soon and I'm trying to figure out how best to use it.

I have 2 coaxial cables and a CAT5 going to most rooms in my house. The are all "homerun" to a storage room. The 1 coax is used for cable TV. The other is unused. It was inteded to be used internally for sharing video devices or for a home video security system.

The single CAT5 cable is currently used as a phone line in all of the rooms. The RJ11 jacks from the telehphones are just plugged into the RJ45 wall jacks.

Eventually I'd like to migrate to using Vonage as my only phone line throughout the house. I'd also like to be able to have ethernet throughout the house as well.

Too bad that unused coax isn't a CAT5 instead. Any suggestions?

Posts: 37 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Feb 12, 2004 Posts: 37

Easy short term solution: it would be very easy to continue to use the middle wire pair in the CAT5 for your old line and the pair immediately outside the middle pair as your Vonage line. If you have a 2-line phone, this is the way it is wired. Also, you can buy a $5 2-line splitter that will plug in and separate the two lines into RJ45 jacks that each use the their middle pairs, allowing you to use one-line phones.

Long term solution: Since you want to use the CAT5 for ethernet, you can use one of the coax lines for Vonage. You would just need to rig up a way to hook the two conductors of the cable to a RJ45 jack. (A coax cable can substitute for a twisted wire pair, but not the other way around.)

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 01, 2004 Posts: 6

Thanks. I was thinging the same thing, but it's suck a hack. Plus I can't figure out how I'm going to squeeze a RJ11 jack onto the end of a rg coaxial cable

Posts: 26 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Feb 12, 2004 Posts: 26

I had (can't seem to find it now) a web page bookmarked that showed how to hook up all that you want using a single CAT5 cable. I can attest that it works because that is exactly what I did in my house. If I remember correctly the blue pair is line 1 and the brown (brown brown/white) pair is line 2. The other 2 pairs are used for the ethernet connection. The only hitch to this is you need to make your own RJ45 to RJ11 phone patch cords to go from the wall jack to your 2 line phone. If you are only going to use one line, no problem, any RJ11 will fit into the RJ45 jack and use the middle two pairs (blue) as line 1. IF you wanted to also run the ethernet over that same line, you would just need to split out the blue pair from the other pairs. I hope this all made sense. I'll try to find what I did with that web link. I have all the documentation at home.

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 01, 2004 Posts: 6

I have been successful at using the existing unused RG6 (cable tv), but I'm a little concerned at the ring voltage running through there since one conductor in the pair is exposed at each juncture. I have considered either wrapping them with electrical tape or just cutting them off and wiring them right into a CAT3 cable and then into an RJ11 jack, avoiding the F-type socket altogether.

I finally found this really good article on mixing telephone and LAN wiring.

http://www.zytrax.com/tech/layer_1/cables/mixed.html

I still haven't decided which way I'm going to go.

Posts: 37 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Feb 12, 2004 Posts: 37

dbmccann wrote:

I'm a little concerned at the ring voltage running through there since one conductor in the pair is exposed at each juncture.

Take this at your own risk, because I'm not sure I'm right... The ring voltage is generated by Vonage Motorola (or cisco) box. The box is isolated from ground by the AC adaptor that powers it. Therefore, the high voltage from your exposed conductor may not seek a path to ground through your body. The reason I might be wrong is that the Vonage box may get a ground connection through some other means (e.g, the ethernet connection).

You could always put a AC volt meter between the exposed conductor and ground to measure the stray ring voltage. If you do this test, please report back here!

Posts: 110 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Mar 06, 2004 Posts: 110

dbmccann wrote:

I finally found this really good article on mixing telephone and LAN wiring.

http://www.zytrax.com/tech/layer_1/cables/mixed.html

I still haven't decided which way I'm going to go.

Wow... GREAT article... nice resource.

Posts: 6 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 01, 2004 Posts: 6

So even after all that great information I still decided to run the phone line over the extra cable. Rather than attempt to keep the cable fittings I wacked them off so I would avoid the whole problem of them grounding out unintentionally. I tried my DMM on the line while it was ringing and the highest I saw was 115V. I wish I had better equipment so I could see the actual peak voltage instead of just a momenary sampling.

The configuration I finally decided on was Voice Terminal -> phone block -> RJ11 Jack male jack -> CAT 3 network cable -> Coax -> CAT 3 -> RJ11 female jack

Pic of Coax hacked into a CAT 3 with a male RJ11.

Pic of RJ11 plugged into the phone block.

Pic of the voice jack I used.

Pic of installed Jack.