Since the house is pretty much movein ready, potential home improvement projects are rather limited. The first one that I had originally planned on doing was wiring the house with ethernet. But low and behold after walking through it as an owner, I noticed that there are RJ45 jacks in various rooms around the house. After the initial bout of enthusiasm, I plugged my MacBook Pro into it and it didn’t detect anything on the other end.
Looking around for a bit, I eventually found a mini wiring cabinet in the garage. Turns out all of those RJ45 jacks are connected to a OnQ Phone Punchdown. After a bit of research, I believe that this problem can be “fixed” by splicing the cable before it hits the punchdown, attaching a patch panel both to the punchdown and walljacks, then using patch cables to connect each jack to either a switch or the phone punchdown. Looking at MonoPrice, I can probably do all this for about 60 bucks(I already have a switch).
The main worry that I have about this plan is having network equipment in a non-climate controlled garage.
#1 by Daniel Jacobowitz on July 31, 2009 - 5:09 pm
So you’ve got RJ-45 4-line phone jacks all over the house? Are there boring phone jacks too?
#2 by Lee on July 31, 2009 - 5:18 pm
I don’t remember seeing any boring phone jacks. The kitchen appears to only have an RJ45 2 line jack(which seems weird to me), but everywhere else has the full compliment.