At 18:33 -0500 03/28/2002, Richard Welty wrote: >also, don't run the phone indepenedntly. if you wire things properly, >then you can play a nice trick. > >basically, the RJ-11 phone jacks with 4 wires plug into the middle of an >RJ-45 connector. they hook up with the center 4 wires. if you've wired >properly, then your wiring can be ethernet or phone. > >what i did is run two strands of Cat 5 and one of RG-6 (video for cable or >satellite tv) from a patch panel in the basement to each room. by >convention, there is one green jack and one blue jack in each drop, one for >phone (green) and one for ethernet (blue), although the two are >electrically equivalent. the convention is a convenience; if you're talking >to someone on a phone or yelling down from the attic, "plug into the green >jack" is easy to get across.
That's basically what I did too, except that I didn't bother to differentiate any jacks by color. I do have a diagram in the wiring closet that tells which patch panel jack connects to which jacks out in the house. It's not quite as easy to distinguish as Richard's color coding is. I wish I had though of that... And as Richard says, any jack can be used for phone or data. It gives you great flexibility. You may not know how many phone and how many data ports you need in a spot, but if you install four cat. 5 jacks, you're probably good for most of your needs. Our study has three wall plates each of which has four jacks, so twelve jacks in the room. Seven of them are in use after only a few years. The greatest difficulty is to get multiple phone extensions. If you have your phone line come in and terminate at a patch panel, it is simple enough to plug a patch cable into the phone line jack, and the other end of the patch cable into the jack that leads to the single extension that you want out in the house. But if you want multiple extensions, you must rig up something else. I took three patch panels and used them as extension makers. Each patch panel has twelve jacks on it. I punched a continuous piece of cable on one of the patch panels so that the top six jacks were connected to each other and used another piece of cable to connect the bottom six jacks to each other. Then I did another panel the same way. Then I did a third panel with nine and three. So to make phone extensions, I would take that patch cable I mentioned above and plug one end into the incoming phone line jack. (I ran six phone lines out to the telephone company box, because it has terminals for six, though we have only two phone lines in service.) I then plug the other end into one of the six common jacks on one of my extension makers. Now whenever I want a phone extension, I just plug a patch cable into one of the five remaining jacks on the extension maker, and the other end of the patch cable goes to the patch panel jack that leads to the jack I want out in the house. I have four of those groups of six, so I could give four phone lines five extensions each. Or I could daisy chain a couple of them and give one phone line nine extensions. Five has always been sufficient so far. The bank of nine jacks I wired together is my LocalTalk Star. One jack connects to my Ethernet/LocalTalk Bridge. The other eight jacks are available to provide LocalTalk connections out to locations in the house. My printers are so old, they have LocalTalk and no ethernet and there are still a few Pluses around here and laptops with no ethernet, but with LocalTalk. >in the patch panel, i have a column for each drop with green & blue jacks >and an F connector for the video, another panel with jacks for the incoming >phone service. i just use ethernet patch cables to hook phones up in rooms >where i want them. the cable modem & firewall sit in the rack, along with >an ethernet switch. the direct tv connection also comes in at this point, >and uses the convenient RG-6 to get to the desired rooms. note that RG-6 >costs about twice as much as Cat 5 (ca $120/1000' vs $60/1000'). An F connector is the terminal for coax cable. It's the thing you screw the end of your television cable onto, with the little hole in the middle for the little wire that sticks out of the middle of the cable. Cat. 5 jacks and F connectors are available in what are called Modular Jacks. These jacks have a square bit of plastic around them. The plastic snaps into standard openings in wall plates. The wall plates are the standard size the screws onto a wall box--the box you mount in the wall with the opening flush with the sheet rock. The wall plates are available with from one to at least eight holes. The modular connectors snap into the holes. So, you could get a single wall plate with four holes, and snap three cat. 5 jacks and an F connector into the wall plate and have all that connectivity on a single wall plate. If you bring your outside connections for cable to the wiring closet and also have all your coax lines in the house terminate at F connectors in the wiring closet, then you can configure your cable TV to any F connector in the house with short coax patch cables and a splitter. F connector patch panels are also available, but I couldn't find any when I did my installation, so I just used wall plates with six openings in my wiring closet for the F connectors. So six coax lines per wall plate in teh wiring closet. I used real patch panels for the cat. 5 lines, but I was lucky and picked those up free from a friend who was doing a new installation where they were removing perfectly good old cat. 5 patch panels. Patch panels can get expensive. Jeff Walther P.S. That was probably an overwhelming amount of information. I recommend that you and/or Ron go to a few stores that sell this stuff and just browse and ponder for a while. Home Depot has a good selection now, though they didn't when I did my installation. If you have a local Graybar Electric, they're a great affordable supplier for this stuff. I thought about it and browsed supplies for most of a year before I actually did my installation, and my concept changed three or four times for the better. More folks are available to offer advice now, than were then, but it's still good to take a little time to think about what you want and need and to be creative about solutions. -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | PowerON Computer Services <http://www.poweron.com> REPLACEMENT PARTS in STOCK Drives, CD-ROMs, RAM, Processors, Power Supply <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
