Town Home Network + Phone

The town home I am living in had ran cat 5 to every room for the phone so I decided to break it out into phone + 100 Base T.  The organization of the cabling was less than acceptable by my standards.  When this place was built in 2006 they felt that putting a duplex cover over a hole in the wall was an acceptable enclosure and simply wire nutted the two wires for the phone lines together and shoved it in the wall.  So I decided to replace that hole in the wall with a 14″ x 14″ Legrand IQ enclosure.  In the enclosure I put a 66 Block, 12 Port Patch panel, 10/100 network switch, and a 4 way splitter for the cable tv that was also just shoved into the wall as well.  Now I am enjoying streaming video to my home media center over my new wired network that works much better than my dd-wrt wireless bridges.

6 thoughts on “Town Home Network + Phone

    • Sorry for the 2 year delay on this response…. I used velcro to attach the switch so it could be easily removed.

      Thanks,
      Nick

  1. Hi there,

    Noticed one thing and wanted to ask the question since I am doing the same thing at the moment. I noticed you have 6 cables going into the patch panel (middle piece) but only 5 cables going into your switch on the left. Why is this? What happened to the other connection point and or what was it used for?

    I’m trying to visually understand.

    Thanks so much!
    -Nigel

    • The Cables on the left are all cat5 from each room and one from the phone company. I used one pair off of each cat5 cable for phone and used the 66block to jumper all of the phone pairs in parallel. I then used two of the remaining pairs of each cable and went from the 66block to the patch panel to the right of the 66block. From the Patch panel to the switch I just have a cat5 patch cable. Because this setup is only using 2 pairs the max speed is 100baseT but you also get phone on the same cable. The reason there are only 5 patch cables is because I decided not to put an ethernet jack in the kitchen but it still has a phone line there.

      Thanks,
      Nick

  2. Nice clean job. I bought a 28″ leviton but am thinking all I need is the14″. If I’m not using phone at all then I wouldn’t need t the 66. Can go with just a patch panel and Ethernet switch. Correct me if I’m wrong about that

    • Correct, The only reason to use a 66 block would be to extend / Splice cables or in my case to isolate one of the pairs for phone or possibly injecting poe voltage?

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