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I’m moving into a new house that looks to have Ethernet wired through it though it looks like it was being used for telephone?

I’m wondering if it will be usable for Internet and if so what changes I need to make/what exactly I need to do.

Also is there any way to tell if it’s all cat 5 or cat 5e?

I don’t know much about this so step by step on how to make it work for Internet would be greatly appreciated. So far my guess is that I need to pull all the wiring out of that current punch panel and add RJ45 connectors to each separate wire? At that point I just need a way to connect them to my router?

Thanks a lot!

enter image description here

Mark
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    the blue cable could be LAN cable ... the rest are probably not ... check the printing on the cables – jsotola Jan 31 '21 at 11:40
  • @jsotola last time I noticed the blue cable said cat 5e though I couldn’t see anything printed on the gray cables. So you’re saying they’re probably not even Ethernet? Or they’re cat 3? – Mark Jan 31 '21 at 12:20
  • The cable should be marked every 2-3 feet, but it may be faint, and it likes to be on the side you're not looking at right this second. Look closely with a strong light. I've installed thousands of feet of gray (riser) 5e as well as thousands of blue (plenum) 5e. Then again, it could be Cat3 after all, but **you can't tell that by jacket color.** – Ecnerwal Jan 31 '21 at 13:35
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    None of that stuff looks like Cat 5, 5e, or 6. None of those cable have the suggested number-of-twists-per-inch for Cat 5 and higher cabling. It's possible its Cat3 or 4, but more likely it's just POTS (plain old telephone system). – SteveSh Jan 31 '21 at 15:22
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    Most of the wires that you can easily see the twist rate on are clearly cut from a 25-pair cable (based on the colors), and that's almost certainly POTS or Cat3 at best. Telephone folks often untwist pairs, as can be seen on some of the hanging splices. Until you read the cable jackets, you won't **know.** – Ecnerwal Jan 31 '21 at 16:16
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    Does this answer your question? [Repurpose telephone line to ethernet](https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/171512/repurpose-telephone-line-to-ethernet) – Peter Duniho Jan 31 '21 at 22:18
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    Don't assume anything, and read the wire labelling - electricians are notoriously lazy and will carry as few different types of wire as possible. So they only need one pair for a phone cable, but are carrying cat5e UTP in the hand/van? No way they'll order special wire, they'll use what's in hand and bill the customer. cat5e and cat6 are made/sold/used in such volumes that its often cheaper than 2pair phone wire anyway. – Criggie Feb 01 '21 at 00:25
  • Also, in a setup like this, there's no guarantee that the installer didn't splice into a LAN cable somewhere hidden if it was meant for telephone. If you have lines that go directly from the box to the panel, you'll have a better chance. But that's only true if all the cables are LAN. – ps2goat Feb 02 '21 at 18:49
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    ...so, 4 days later, what does the printing on the gray cables actually say? – Ecnerwal Feb 03 '21 at 16:00
  • @Ecnerwal they actually have nothing printed on them at all. I looked super close with a flash light and everything. They’re just blank. Anyways it turns out there’s actually some standard cat 5e wiring going through a different closet all together in the house (not nearly as much as this telephone wiring though). Not going to touch any of this after all :) thanks for all the help though! I definitely learned a bit haha – Mark Feb 09 '21 at 15:31

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enter image description here

Read the jacket - I think I can see, but not make out, faint red printing on at least two of the gray cables in your picture. But there's no guarantee that all the gray cables are the same, if this system grew organically over time rather than having been all installed at once.

Even if it's CAT3, it will run ethernet (slowly by modern standards.) That will be fine for a printer that plugs into ethernet, and other uses that are not too demanding, but won't suit your faster goals - in which case you might examine how it's installed, and whether you can use the current cables to help you get new cables into the places you actually need faster connections.

Your best bet at this end would be to install a patch panel, rather than "plugs on cables" - plugs on fixed cables are iffy (they tend to fail,) while a patch panel is quite reliable, (and also easier to connect to) and helps to organize the mess.

You'll also need a switch, to get the signal from a cable leading to your router to all the other cables (or all the other cables you are actually using.)

Beware that as phone wiring, there's no guarantee that the wiring completely respects a "star" configuration (each cable here leads only one place) - some legs of the apparent star may be "daisy-chained" to more than one outlet, and that does not fly with Ethernet like it does with telephones.

Ecnerwal
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    This answer is correct. That's a phone line terminal. Phone lines don't need star network configuration, so don't expect that ethernet will just work over lines wired for phone. Also, CAT5/e/6 are just fine to run phone signals over, that's what basically everyone does these days. You can pull apart a normal Cat5 cable and get 4 phone pairs. – Gorchestopher H Feb 01 '21 at 15:25
  • Depending on where you live cat3 might still outdo your internet speed (to the router) by a good margin, 10mbps is still sufficient for any casual use imho – Hobbamok Feb 02 '21 at 13:55
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This was clearly being used as telephone wiring. Even if some of the cables are ethernet cables they have been cut and spliced for phone use and there may be splices hidden in the walls similar to what you see here. That's ok for phones. Even if some of them "work" for ethernet they may work slowly. You will not know, you'll just blame your ISP.

My suggestion is don't use any of this for internet. Buy good Cat6 or better cables. Don't buy the cheapest ones on Amazon, but good ones with good reviews. Run cables to a few critical spots in your home from a central location. Buy and install a mesh network with wired backhaul (so the mesh nodes all use your new cables) and buy a small switch if needed to connect it all together.

All this will cost a few hundred dollars and is worth the investment in your new home.

jay613
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    *You will not know, you'll just blame your ISP.* "Gosh, I get 877 Mb/sec when I plug into the router directly, but only 8 Mbit when I plug into the cable in the pink bedroom. Must be my ISPs fault" ....riiight. – Ecnerwal Jan 31 '21 at 16:09
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    @Ecnerwal although I was being slightly facetious with that comment I maintain that most people, probably including OP, either could not or would not perform such diagnostics. – jay613 Jan 31 '21 at 16:41
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    "Cat6 or better" feels like future-proofing in the wrong place. 5e is all you'll ever need for home GE, Cat6 will do as well if the price difference is negligible. Buying anything like Cat7 is likely a pure waste of money. If you want to future-proof, run conduit instead of Cat7 so that you can go fiber if you ever need to. It's fairly unlikely metallic 10GE will ever become a thing in the consumer world, with more and more devices now being mobile/IoT. – TooTea Feb 01 '21 at 09:54
  • @TooTea I agree in theory but 1) I'm suggesting 2 to 5 premade patch cables of 50 to 150 feet. Cost difference is negligible. Cat5E cables on Amazon, especially cheap ones, are frequently garbage. Decent Cat6 cable is an extra $6. 2) Installing conduit for future fiber is ambitious given OP circumstances (just moved in) and knowledge, I think running a few premade patch cords and setting up a Mesh network should be his first step. And 3) Given improvement in Wifi and 5G, what future application do you envision for in-home fiber? I'd like to know! – jay613 Feb 01 '21 at 14:10
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    @jay613 I don't see any applications at the moment and I can't see into the future. But that's exactly my point. I don't think OP will ever need 10GE, but I think it's way more unlikely that they will need one particular kind of metallic 10GE (or 5GE, …) that requires Cat6a/7/+ twisted pair. Anyone who _really_ wants to invest into future-proofing their home network should do it the conduit way, precisely because it's hard to pick a particular future networking technology at this point. – TooTea Feb 01 '21 at 14:24
  • @jay613 (But if you want to build a 10GE home network right now, it's still easier to do it in fiber. Cheap off-brand optical 10GBase-SR hardware is much easier to come by than the metallic 10GBase-T counterparts.) – TooTea Feb 01 '21 at 14:34
  • It's worth pointing out that cat5e can do 2.5G and plain cat6 can do 5G. Cat 6 can even do 10G up to 55m, though it can't meet the full spec for 100m (but how often do we need that in homes?) You only need cat6a or 7 if you really need medium distance 10G, between 55 and 100m. – Nate S. Feb 01 '21 at 16:49
  • @Ecnerwal exactly. Like most Routers show you how much they get. Or you hook up a Laptop directly to it and do a speedtest there. OP will have to redo the plugs at both ends anyways so he'll definitely check the cables in isolation – Hobbamok Feb 02 '21 at 14:00
  • Agreed with @jay613, definitely a phone patch panel that happened to use Cat-whatever cable instead of regular 2-pair phone cable. If OP wants ethernet and not phone, they'll have to re-run and set up a new patch panel/switch at this point. Can just tape new cable to the end of the old and pull from the other end, easy peasy. – R Greenstreet Feb 03 '21 at 17:29
  • @jay613 I think anybody posting on stackexchange/knows that there’s a difference between cat 5/5e would probably know enough to not blame their ISP in that situation :) – Mark Feb 09 '21 at 15:35
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The grey stuff is often non-twisted pair, or unshielded twisted pair. As others have said, read the label.

The blue stuff could be cat 3 or cat 5, but unless you have access to both ends, it's a crap shoot whether it has a continuous run. You may be able to figure some out by temporarily unhooking wires, and seeing where you have dial tones.

You have some decisions to make:

  • Do you need wired LAN throughout your house. If you do lots of internet file sharing, or run a home server, then the answer is yes, at least between the server and your internet access device. If you stream TV at anything above default resolution you will want a wired link between the internet access point and the TV device.

  • You may also want it if you have several people who want to use high bandwidth applications at the same time. SOHO operations that use cloud SaaS may need this.

  • Wifi works pretty well. But the closer you are to the wifi access point, the faster it is. You may want LAN between your internet access point and your wifi units at various places in the house.

In its simplest form all your house wires come to a patch panel. There a short patch cable runs from the panel to your switch.

Wire for stuffing in walls isn't stranded. This gives it less electrical resistance, but also makes it stiffer. It has less tolerance for being bent. Patch cables are either stranded, or are made from softer copper.

Sherwood Botsford
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    "Wifi works pretty well." - that really depends on where you live. If your walls act as Faraday cage (many places in Europe) or you live in dense city (so there is lot of interference) you might run into problems. – Maciej Piechotka Feb 02 '21 at 03:36
  • @MaciejPiechotka exactly my thought lol. In my parents house we didn't have wifi through a single wall with the sole exception of those my parents had put in during renovations. We ended up wiring almost the entire house because it was just the worst – Hobbamok Feb 02 '21 at 13:57
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The wiring workmanship shown here, no matter what the cable type is, cannot be relied on to yield satisfactory ethernet operation. The way twisted pairs are untwisted for several inches, with the individual wires crossing other wiring in an uncontrolled fashion... stubs of old parallel connections just left dangling... if it works, it is still likely to cause and/or be sensitive to RF interference. The reason the wires are twisted in a twisted pair cable is NOT mechanical and NOT a stylistic or manufacturing choice.

If the actual intent is running a DSL line to a router, it could work - unlike ethernet, DSL is DESIGNED to work around imperfectly done wiring. However, even DSL cannot always deal with a so called bridge-tap situation that might be present here (multiple lines wired as parallel circuits, even if there is nothing connected at the end of the circuit - all these communications technologies work with RF electricity; the concept that a circuit with no load connected does not matter is NOT true with RF).

rackandboneman
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    Yes, it's rather obviously **currently** telephone wiring, so there's no reason to expect it to "yield satisfactory ethernet operation" in it's current form. That's also not the question. – Ecnerwal Feb 01 '21 at 02:00
  • >cannot be relied on to yield satisfactory ethernet operation. | yeah, but just redoing the plugs at both ends is a twenty minute task costing a few bucks VS redoing the cabeling which will run you days and a good bit of cash – Hobbamok Feb 02 '21 at 13:58
  • @Hobbamok Putting plugs on the ends of crap wires only wastes plugs and "20 minutes". (Chances are anyone asking this question to begin with has zero to very little experience putting ends on Ethernet cable, so 20 minutes is pretty generous estimate.) Even by some freak chance it works, it won't work well or reliably. It's better to cut the crap out and do it correctly...Both to ensure future compatibility and also to avoid fighting with it. – gnicko Feb 05 '21 at 19:49
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Technically, yes. When my roommate and I got our first cable modem some 20 years ago, a friend of his ran Cat3 into my room (he had lots of the stuff) and wired it up and it worked well enough for the 2 years we lived there.

I say technically because he simply provided the minimum Ethernet needs. Ethernet uses only 4 wires to work on the data end, so his friend crimped RJ45 jacks on using only pins 1, 2, 3, and 6. There's two major caveats here

  1. Cat3 isn't designed for shielding at all. Shielding is somewhat important to Ethernet. In my case, the wire was stuffed under the baseboard down a hallway (where there's virtually no interference). It was also a 10MB network, not the 1000MB you commonly find today.
  2. You can't run any Power over Ethernet (PoE), since pins 4, 5, 7, and 8 are all missing.

So you can try and it might be passable for a home network, but it isn't the right tool for the job and it may not be forward compatible.

Machavity
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    Sheilding is not important to ethernet. I run thousands of feet of Cat5e unsheilded and it runs gigabit just fine. UTP (unsheilded twisted pair) is normal and standard. FTP or STP (foil or shielded, respectively) are abnormal. It's the twisting and how the signals are run that makes it work, mostly. Also, only 10 Mb and 100 Mb ethernet "only use 4 pins" - Gigabit uses all 8. The cables shown are 4-pair cables (and some irrelevant to this discussion 25-pair cable from its telephone job.) – Ecnerwal Feb 01 '21 at 15:18
  • Standard PoE (IEEE 802.3af) can work on the same pairs as Ethernet if the PSE (the device which provides the power) uses Mode A (usually switches rather than injectors). Mode A uses the "phantom power" technique. – jcaron Feb 02 '21 at 13:53
  • PoE is still an upcoming feature, so while it IS something to keep in mind, it would (for me) not be a reason to redo the cables. [IF the stuff OP has is indeed cat3] – Hobbamok Feb 02 '21 at 14:01
  • Shielding isn't. But clean twist geometry with as little disturbances as possible and correct wire pairing IS. The twist actually provides shielding by a very clever trick (making sure any interference on the cable is at the same time applied in reverse, thus cancelling out). – rackandboneman Feb 19 '21 at 21:06
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Is this part of a SOHO (small office, home office ) DIGITAL phone system? the 2 large cables (trunk lines I think is the term) are a clue it's attached to a KSU. Also, the connectors shown are typically used on phone lines. The smaller cables should have printed on them the type of cable. The blue ones look like cat 5, the grey ones look like cat 3 (not suitable for ethernet). Repurposing some of might be possible. But, and here's the big BUT if the phone lines are not all "home runs" and are daisy chained (common for POTS phone wiring), you can't re-use them. They're also probably cat-3, again, not suitable for ethernet.

All you can do is start tracing circuits. Get some testing equipment at go at it.

George Anderson
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    Thanks a lot this was helpful. Previous owner had a law firm so I think it’s safe to assume this was part of their home office. If the cables are anything less than 5e I won’t bother with it regardless as cat 5 would be slower than wifi in my case – Mark Jan 31 '21 at 12:18
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    Jacket color is **not** an indication of CAT level - read the (often faint) printing. Blue jacket is (usually) plenum, gray jacket is (usually) riser, and could be Cat3, Cat5, Cat5e... – Ecnerwal Jan 31 '21 at 13:32
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    @Ecnerwal Back when I used to do a lot more cabling of offices, I would get 2 or 3 different colors of the same type of cable just to make identification easier when pulling multiple cables to the same location. – manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact Jan 31 '21 at 14:51
  • @Mark what's your usecase that you're scoffing at low-latency 10mbps ? – Hobbamok Feb 02 '21 at 14:02
  • It's also important to note that much of the CAT5 that was made actually passes the specs for CAT5e without changes, other than "well that standard didn't exist when I was made so it's not printed on me" - always worth a shot to see if you get Gigabit or only 100Megabit from a particular chunk of Cat5, no "e" (as an end-user - as an installer we're often in the position of having to rip out stuff that might work fine to satisfy work-order specs/consistency.) – Ecnerwal Feb 03 '21 at 16:11
  • @Hobbamok pretty much anything other than web browsing? I was considering using this wiring as Ethernet backhaul for my mesh WiFi (most clients and going to be on WiFi no matter what for us - other than an Xbox) so it wouldn’t make sense to drop a speed at a node to 10mbps for the slight decrease in latency – Mark Feb 09 '21 at 15:29
  • @Mark ahh, I thought this was going to be a home-network, yeah if you serve multiple clients etc. then 10mbps is definitely not gonna cut it. In that case doing it anew is probably a good approach – Hobbamok Feb 10 '21 at 11:33