On Thu, 9 Nov 2017, John Jason Jordan wrote:
... the skinny white fiber cable just dangles down between the studs and the end of it plugs into the back of the 'modem.'
John, Interesting. I have a large box inside the house and opposite another large box outside the house. The Frontier installer drilled a hole from the inside out and stuck a long rod through it to easily find the outside. After mounting the outside box he put the fiber and telephone cables through the hold and filled around it with silicon sealant. The inside box has connectors for phone and internet as well as a backup battery. There's an RJ-45 outlet built into that large junction box and the cat5 runs from there to the WAN port on my router. With Frontier there's no 'modem' but they will provide a wireless router if there's no existing Ethernet one.
Now the wall is about to have sheetrock. I could drill a little hole in it and feed the fiber cable through it, but that strikes me as really not very professional. The cable from the street should connect to the back of some kind of jack, and then there should be a short piece to connect the jack to the back of the modem thingy, sort of like we use patch cords to connect ethernet wall outlets to whatever device we are using (laptop, etc.).
Before you put up the sheet rock go to Home Depot/Lowe's and buy a plastic junction box with an RJ-45 faceplate and an RJ-45 outlet. I would clip off the RJ-45 plug and put an outlet on it (wiring diagram available on the Web or I can send you a copy). Then you can use cat5/5e/6 or whatever to run the signal from that outlet to your router.
I did, however, discover that there exist fiber connectors in keystone jacks, which would be ideal for my situation. I wired my entire house with Cat6 ethernet cable, so I know all about keystone jacks. In fact, the wall where the fiber terminates now has a panel with 20 keystone jacks connecting to all the ethernet ports throughout the house. That panel could easily have one more keystone jack.
There you go!
Unfortunately I am pretty stupid about fiber. It appears that there are different kinds of keystone jacks for different kinds of fiber, and I have no idea which kind to get. I also don't know what is required to connect the end of the cable from the street to the back of the jack, or what kind of patch cable I need to go from the jack to the modem. It looks like the end of the cable just plugs into the back of the modem, so I pulled on it to see if it just comes out, but it was kind of tight and I didn't want to force it, so I left it alone.
Inside the house it should be Ethernet; the optical translator should be on the outside. That's the way it is here with Frontier's installation. The fiber terminates in the outside box and the converter moves electrons across the cat5 to the inside box. Rich _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
