Home LAN over unused phone wires?

[nagornyi]

I noticed that of 6 wires in my home phone cable only 2 are actually used. I wander if I can use the remaining 4 wires for home LAN. I understand that real LAN cable has 8 wires, but.. are all of them needed? The phone line is not hook to external provider, I feed it myself from VoIP.

 

[smegecki]

This is not a good idea.

the lan cable does have 4 prs but only 2 are used.

The orange pair and the green pair terminated on pins 12 36 of a 568b color code.

The twist of the voice cable wouldnt be suffiecient for high speed data.

I am not quite sure what you mean by voip fed by you. That in itself would be an ethernet connection unless you've got some fancy convertor from voip to analog.

Anyway with all that said if its a short run pin it out test it and see if it works..it may work..you may experience cross talk and latency..I suggest that you install a cat5 cable for the data.

 

[nagornyi]

Thank you. Two wires of the cable are fed from VoIP box with a regular phone signal, the remaining 4 are just loose. I measn it is guaranteed that the 4 cable are not hooked anywhere, so there is no voltage on them, etc. Where can I find a reference on how to connect two LAN plugs with wires? Thanks.

 

[smegecki]

Google is a wonderful tool.
Here is something I found.

http://www.lanshack.com/make-cat5E.asp

 

[smegecki]

Here are some basic cat 5 instructions. I realize your not using cat 5 but the pin out is described here also.

http://www.lanshack.com/cat5e-tutorial.asp

Best bet would be to pull a new cable.

 

[nagornyi]

Thank you guys. I'll give it a try and report back to you. I understand that, if even workable, the solution is not as good as cat5 cable, but let's see..

 

[skip555]

if all you are looking for is internet sharing it MAY work just fine

 

[jimbopalmer]

While I personally feel it is ill advised, I do reccommend you configure your NICs to use 10 megabit half duplex, that gives you the best chance of success.

I tried to remain child-like, all I acheived was childish.

 

[macphoneguy]

I don't quite know where to Start, first; you don't say what your house wire is Cat3 or 5, Most Older House wire would only be clasified as Cat3 at Best, as In My House the person wired it with 3 pair Cross connect, White Blue White orange White Green, Secondly; most House's I've seen are wired for RJ11 jack either Flush Mount, Surface or wall those jacks only have 4 wires, if you are going to run even "semi serious" data or VO-IP I would strongly suggest replacing it with something newer, third; Most house's have RJ-11 Jack, where any ethernet data of 10mb or 100mb would require a RJ-45 jack, it is a 8 Position jack that 1,2,3 &6 are normally used for Data where pins 4 & 5 are where the white/blue or Green/red pair would belong, you can put a RJ-11 cord in a RJ45 jack but you cannot put a RJ45 into a RJ-11 as it is a square peg on a round hole, I would suggest going to leviton.com and going to the techsupport & Education link

 

[franklin97355]

macphoneguy: More like a big square peg in a small square hole.

 

[skip555]

first; you don't say what your house wire is Cat3 or 5, Most Older House wire would only be clasified as Cat3 at Best



keep in mind 10 base t ethernet runs on cat 3 two pair

probably the bigger problem in this scenaro would be home run vs loop

more than likley this is a loop configuration which will prety much sink the project

 

[nagornyi]

I need to stretch the LAN from the basement to one bedroom on the 2nd floor, I don't need to hook other places. The reason I am looking into using phone wires is to avoid having the LAN cable on the surface. When I detach the phone wall plate, I see there is enough room inside for even a dozen of LAN cables, but... how to put them in without oupening the walls? The house is new and there are no access points in between. Looks like the wireing was done when no walls yet. But may be there is a way to put an extra cable in?..? Any advise appreciated.

 

[skip555]

first check to be sure you have continuity on all four wires (both pairs ) betweent the basement and the second floor

if you dont look behind any jacks between the two points lots of times the wire is cut there by inexperianced installers if the wire is cut you will need to splice it

get two cat5 jacks and hook up one pair where blue white should be and the second pair where green white should be.

certainly not the best solution but in your postion I would sure try it before pulling cable.

 

[jesseeu]

I've used phone wire before for ethernet connections and yes it does work. You may run in to problems if you are running multiple data connections on the same cable due to interference (for example, could run two data connections on the 4 pair cable). I also don't think you'll get 300ft out of it, but a short run like you've described shouldn't be a problem. Just give it a try, the worst that can happen is that it won't work.

 

[nagornyi]

Thank you guys all for your valuable inputs, but I need an extra piece of help to give this idea a try, please.
So I obtained two cat5 jacks that look like this

http://cat5deals.com/images/rj11rj45wallplate002.jpg

(the bottom jack is cat5).
First I am trying to connect the jacks with 4 short wires to try it locally and make sure I know how to connect them correct. But I am completely lost which contacts to connect, and unfortunately the links above do not help.
The jack, if looked from behind, has 8 holes in checkers order with following colored wires protruding from them:

BLU   BLK   GRN   BRN
   ORG   RED   YLW   WHT

So, which 4 wires of the 8 to be used? I am looking into the links suggested above and, yes, I see blue/whine and green/whine wires on the pictures, but...how to use those pictures I have no clue.
Any help is deeply appreciated.

 

[smegecki]

red and green should be pins 4+5
yellow and black should be pins 3+6

not sure about the others 2 pair

you need to terminate on pins 1+2 and 3+6 for ethernet. I have never seen an ethernet jack like that before it looks like your losing the twists.

the best way would be to tone each pin individually to map out what terminal on the back it resides on.then connect your wires accordingly. i will try to google it.

 

[GoTellBigDaddy]

nagornyi (MIS) Oct 12, 2004
I noticed that of 6 wires in my home phone cable only 2 are actually used. I wander if I can use the remaining 4 wires for home LAN. I understand that real LAN cable has 8 wires, but.. are all of them needed? The phone line is not hook to external provider, I feed it myself from VoIP.

What !

1. The 6 wires on your home phone: NO, never run LAN for this.

2. Why ? 980-90VAC ring current.

3. Can you do it ? Sure, do anything you want. Will it work ? Yeah.

The older I get, the less I know

 

[NCBrit]

Why not make it easy on yourself, and use homeline or powerline adapters. Linksys has some.