Wire phone and data on one cat5 cable?

[projectpete]

I am building a home and want to wire it for home lan and phone. They are all going to a central box in the garage.

Can I use pins 7 & 8 for the phone and the other pins for the data/lan? This will only be used for sharing internet at home so I dont think packet loss should be a huge deal. What do you think?

ex:

I will run one cat5 cable to my bedroom from the box in the garage. In my bedroom I will connect pins 1,2,3,4,5,6 to a RJ-45 connector and from the same cable pins 7 and 8 to a RJ-11 telephone jack. At the box I will connect pins 1,2,3,4,5,6 to the data punch block and pins 7 and 8 to the phone punch block.

 

[phoneguy55]

It will work but this is not the "right" way to do things. Voice grade cable is pretty cheap, so why not run another cable and while you are at it pull some coax as well.

 

[DigitelD]

You probably will regret doing that later. I agree with phoneguy55, run phone and data separately.

 

[projectpete]

well i was going to use this method also for my dads house which is already built. He has cat5 for all his phones that go to a central punch down box. Wireless will not reach all the rooms in his house, I tried an antenna extender and repeater, still doesnt work.

I will probably just pull separate cable for my house as it is new, but i wanted to know if this would word because my dads house is already built and dont want to feed cable through the walls.

thanks

 

[projectpete]

will i notice any interference or anything like that?

 

[skip555]

been discussed here many times in the past , poor prqac tice but would probably work ok for a home network where less than 10 meg connection is probably just fine .

try it , what do you have to lose ?

on the new construction pull seprate cables

 

[mforrence]

As others have said, best practice is seperate cables. Reality is that sharing a cable will work just fine and you'll probably never notice any degrade in service. It just makes for kludgey connections...
Mike

 

[franklin97355]

If you look at the wiring of 568A or B the blue pair is in the middle and is traditionally used for voice on the older 10baseT systems that shared phone and data. If you are passing analog for the phone you probably be OK but might loose your network connection when the phone rings. The only way to be sure is to try it.

The answer is "42"

 

[Auger282]

I agree with phoneguy but I would suggest running something heavier like cat6 .. its not much more but you'll be good for any future tech. (you never know when computers are going to need all 6).

Besides that run a phone line.. and I think coax is a great idea too.

 

[skip555]

ld use 5e in condit then if you need to repalce or add down the road its easy to do .

I

 

[buitenhek]

Reminds me way back when..we had splitters on both end to take advantage of all cables for both voice and data in one sheath. The data speeds at that time were slow (<mbps) so no problems. But today, the higher speed data mixed with the lower speed voice WILL cause bleeds, feeds and aliens.

Regards
Peter Buitenhek
Profit Developer.com

 

[rocky0217]

Definatly run two seperate cables. At least cat 5e. Why not always have room for expansion. Plus when you get done seperating pairs out on both ends you are just adding to the loss. Good luck.

 

[lopes1211]

For dad - could use wireless for all rooms that reach. For the other's use the cat5 for data and you could use "phone over AC" extenders. Basically your phone line plugs into a box that plugs into an AC outlet. The other end plugs into an AC outlet somewhere else in the house and provides a phone jack. If you use Linksys 54G routers or access points, a Linksys WAP54G ($55) access point can also be configured as a repeater so the entire house is covered and you don't even need to deal with any copper for data.

-CL

 

[gblucas]

I have actually done this recently in a new home that was pre-wired all CAT-5e. It works great. I have put a tester on the network and tested it and I get a full 100base-t. Pins 7 and 8 are used for Power in PoE applications. Separating them for voice, does not affect the network. As stated before, best practices says "NO", but it does work very well for a home network. I just punched down the first 3 pairs to a 568b block and the brown pair to another block. I really liked my results. I would do it again, if I had the same situation. If you have the choice of running 2 cables in a new buildout, absolutely run 2 cables.

gblucas

 

[projectpete]

nice! thanks for the info

 

[daveweb]

Great topic, not one that is addressed often because of it's non-standard inclination.

Ok we have established that this does work, though not preferrable to separate wiring. I have another twist to this issue.

I have digital phone from Time Warner. The house was new construction (no I didn't get it wired with an additional cable [stupid][stupid], but they wanted $3,500 8( ) and it has never had traditional telco phone service so I don't have a central entry point into the house for the phone line. The "phone" wiring goes cable coax to cable/phone modem to rj-11 to wall jack. From this jack (in my office), the phone is apparently distributed to the rest of the house's phone jacks and the data goes from the cable modem to my switch.

Is this a usable setup for mixed phone/lan? I have read about home-run versus multi-drop wiring... is this a multi-drop, which would render mixed cabling impossible?

If it is possible I guess I would need to install the punchdown block in my office instead of the basement or garage.

Any help is appreciated.

 

[projectpete]

If each cable goes to a separate phone jack then yes you can use pin 7/8 for phone and the rest for data