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Apartment Cat5e Re-wiring for Internet

Unverrich

Unverrich

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 24, 2008
100
0
USA
I need some help, I moved into a new place and the phone jacks on the wall had two plugs, both for phoneline. I looked at the wiring and there are two cables behind every wallplate, yellow and blue. The blue says Cat5e cable. So i bought new wallplates so you can hook up a phoneline and ethernet jack and I wired them to the new wallplates. What I want to do is make my house a wired internet for my Apple TVs but it doesnt work. What do i do?

I have my computer room going to my router then to the wallplate, and each apple tv in the other rooms going to the wallplate but im getting nothing.

Anyone know what to do?
 
It sounds like you didn't wire the jacks correctly on either (or both) sides.
 
No i wired them correctly on both ends. Do I have to do something in the patchpanel in my utility room?
 
Honestly, there's just not much information to go on. If it were wired for phone use before, it could be the jacks are daisy-chained from one to the next, which is common for phone use. Do you have a tone generator or a wire tester?
 
No, no wire tester. I think I found out whats going on. All the cat5e wires run to a box and then they are all split and punched into some board, but the brown and green wires arent attached inside the box, just set aside. Could that be the problem? Or do those colors not really matter for internet use?
 
100 Mb connections require 2 pair (4 wires) and gigabit requires all 4 pair (8 wires). Get them all punched down.

However, I have no idea what this box and board actually does. Each wire from the LAN jack should terminate to one (and only one) port with a direct connection (no daisy chaining or connecting to something else beforehand).
 
wow. You should stop doing whatever you are doing before you get in trouble and mess up your neighbors phone lines. If you wanted to run your network on the cat5, you have to control both ends of the cable. Right now, one end is in a punch down box for the phones, you will not be able to get this working.
 
dukebound85 said:
hmm? I have lived in numerous apartments and have never had wireless issues. I wonder what the op's reason is though
Click to expand...

Well, wired beats wireless every time, for anyone who does any kind of serious home networkng.. e.g. NAS or HD streaming. If a house comes pre-wired with Cat5, it is certainly a good idea to take advantage of it.

Of course, the OP problem is that he has no clue what he's doing. From the sound of it, he is punching down his Cat5 runs into Cat3 phone termination panel or something similar. My best advise to OP would be to spend a few bucks hiring a professional to properly terminate and test all Cat5 runs.
 
Without knowing what the cat5e wires connect to, there's not much point of trying to work with them. For all you know they aren't connected to anything but are just there for future building installs. You need to buy a wire tester and see if they are actually running to the patch panel in your utility closet.
 
I know for a fact that they are running to my patch panel, i havent moved anything yet just wanted some advice. There are two wires going to each wall plate in each room, so i have 5 wall plates, so thats 10 cables, 5 blue and 5 yellow, and when you open the patch panel, you see 5 yellow and 5 blue coming down into the box and you see 1 yellow and 1 blue coming in from the bottom of the box, (the source maybe?) I took a picture of the box.

All i wanted to know is since the phone lines are being ran with the yellow wires (i dont wanna touch those) and the blue wires are just there not being used, i wanted to use the blue wire for home networking. My thing is, the blue wires are also punched down in this patch panel and have no idea why, they arent being used. so whats the point of the patch panel for the blue wires?

p.s. wireless in my apartment sucks, cant get a strong signal anywhere. (i use airport extreme base station)

Oh yeah, and you can also see in the picture that from the blue and yellow wires, the green and brown ones arent punched down at all.
 

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Unverrich said:
My thing is, the blue wires are also punched down in this patch panel and have no idea why, they arent being used. so whats the point of the patch panel for the blue wires?
Click to expand...

Someone was using them for voice lines perhaps? ...

My "new" house was previously wired with 4 separate voice lines, some of which were run to various parts of the house with blue Cat 5 cable even though the pairs were split out to individual analog voice lines.

That's a lot of wires for an apt!

B
 
Unverrich said:
...i wanted to use the blue wire for home networking.
Click to expand...
If you want any sort of reliable network connection they must be terminated properly. All of the blue wires leading to the punch down block should be cut off, and terminated with rj45 plugs. You would then locate your router at the location of the punch down block and plug the individually terminated rj45 plugs into your router leading to the various jacks throughout the apartment. This also requires that your main internet connection be located at the same point, unless you use one of the cat 5 cable to feed your internet connection from another location into the box. The twists in the wires are there to protect the signal integrity and they should be terminated with rj45 plugs no more than an inch from the end of the outer blue jacket. You can probably get by with more considering it looks as though the jacket has been stripped back pretty far. You do not want to try and run a network location through a twisted pair punch down block. At the very least you will need to purchase some rj45 ends, and a matching crimper. Pay close attention to the order of the pairs in the plugs. orange white, orange, green white, blue, blue white, green, brown white, brown. This is the correct order in the rj45 plug when looking at where the wire are inserted into the connector, with the "hook" facing down.
 
It's common for the phone company to use cat5 for voice lines. It makes it easy to add additional lines after the initial run. They only need to use two out of eight wires to run a voice line then they tie off the rest. If they need to add an additional line in the same apartment later, they pick two more wires and make the connections.

You don't need to mess with preinstalled phone wiring in an apartment. ESPECIALLY if you don't know what you're doing and don't have the proper testing tools. Remember it's not your property, you're just renting.

If you want a wired network, run your own cat5 using surface mount conduit. There's lots available that's pretty unobtrusive. Leave the phone company's wiring alone.
 
Darth.Titan said:
You don't need to mess with preinstalled phone wiring in an apartment. ESPECIALLY if you don't know what you're doing and don't have the proper testing tools. Remember it's not your property, you're just renting.

If you want a wired network, run your own cat5 using surface mount conduit. There's lots available that's pretty unobtrusive. Leave the phone company's wiring alone.
Click to expand...

What he said. If you don't have a proper cable tester (made by Fluke, JDSU, and number of others) - you really shouldn't be touching this. Also, if you're renting an apartment - you need to get permission from your landlord before you do any wiring changes, especially if you're touching common patch panes serving other apartments in your building (and if I was your landlord - my answer would be a clear "no").

If you do get a permission to do this and you insist on doing it yourself.. I would recommend removing the blue runs from the common patch panel, and terminating them with direct RJ45 ends, which you then plug into a LAN switch.. or investing in a separate Cat5e patch panel just for data connections. But again, I would advise hiring a certified professional to do this, as you seem to have no experience in this sort of thing. And based on the pictures you posted - whoever did the cable termination on these patch panels - did an extremely crappy job.
 
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