Hey guys
Right now I have five or so ethernet ports in my house - only one of them works, and this is the one that I use for my CenturyLink gateway to provide WiFi throughout the house (along with some Plume pods)
I’ve recently decided that I want to “turn on” all the other ethernet ports in the house. I look through the rooms and all the wall jacks do have Cat5 cables connected, and I located them in my basement (connected to nothing).
It currently looks like there is no patch panel, switch, etc - the only thing I can find is a 66 block that is wired up to telephone jacks throughout the house.
After some research, i drew up this diagram as a plan to activate all the inactive ethernet jacks throughout the house. Am I thinking about this the correct way? Would this work? I feel like I can safely just ignore the 66 block because 1) it has nothing to do w/ networking and 2) it’s already wired up to phone jacks and I wouldn’t need to convert any of those lines to ethernet RJ45s.
any advice would be amazing, thanks.
That will work, I had basically the exact same thing. The cables came from the rooms, went through a 66 block and then into a patch panel. It worked fine for me, gigabit speeds and all. So yep, if your stuff is wired to either the A or B standard, you can do this. Make sure those room outlets are in fact wired for ethernet. I had at least one that was only for phone, so I had to reterminate it. An ethernet tester would be a useful tool to have, I would avoid the cheap $10 ones and look for the Klein LAN Scout Jr. - I think it’s worth the extra cost.
Mine just kept bugging me, because before I moved here it was a hybrid of phones and ethernet. Plus remodels had ditched some of the original lines, so I pulled it apart and ran the room cables right into a new 12-port patch panel and eliminated the 66-block. I just wanted to tidy things up.