Dear Breaktime
I am building a large addition on my house,and I am starting to wire it now.I just finished the article in the march issue of Fine Homebuilding about using the cat5e wire in place of bell wire for the phone.
It makes sense to me so I ran down to our local electrical store and bought all the wire.Then to home depot for the panal and boards.Well it just so happens that my phone line went dead today.I troubled shooted it,and we had a broken wire outside of the box from ameritech.
I replaced the old two wire with cat5e wire,but when I open the juction box from ameritech there are only two terminals.The cat5e wire is a 6 wire bundle,do I need a new juction box from ameritech for the cat5e wire?Or do i just still hook up the two wires like the old way?Thats the way I did it and it works fine,but I do not want to pay all that money for cat5e wire and not have the benfits if the old juction box will not handle the new wire.
Thanks Mike
Replies
?? telephone lines are basically a 2 leg circuit which allows the propogation of analog, digital, or with the use of a carrier, multiple mixed signals. CAT5 gives you multiple twisted pair circuits in one cable, any one of which may be sourced through your telephone line - perhaps multiple connections.
If all you ever intended to do was to connect 'dumb' phones to the outside world, then I believe your expenditures and work are for naught benefit. But, if you want to build an intranet, share data internally, and share devices, then you have a key part of your infrastructure built and ready.
Phill Giles
The Unionville Woodwright
Unionville, Ontario
Are you SURE you installed Cat5? Cat5 should have a total of 8 wires...needed for 100baseT ethernet. Actually, many recommend using Cat5e now, which will supposedly support 1000baseT ethernet.
As for your phone, just treat it like multiple sets of POTS line. Just use the wires you need. Later, if you want to use it for ethernet, you'll just use more of the wires.
I do hope you ran more than one line of Cat5, though, or else you are stuck using it for phone OR networking, but not both.