It is not uncommon to be able to convert phone lines to Ethernet, but before you get started you need to make sure that the phone lines were originally put in using the right kind of cable and topology or network design to be able to be used for Ethernet.
Once you are sure the original network was set up in a way suitable for conversion it is simply a process of re terminating all of the cables with the proper connectors and verifying that everything is set up correctly. In this article I will go through how to tell if your phone network is a good candidate for conversion and how to go about setting everything up. Before we can decide if the phone lines in your house were installed using cable that is good enough to be used in an Ethernet network we need to figure out exactly what kind of cable is installed in your walls.
Much of the time the category or type of cable is printed right on the outside of the cable, but if you do not see the category number or if you are in a situation where you cannot even see much of the outside of the cable at all we can still look at the back of a phone jack and get a good idea of whether it will work or not.
The first thing to look at is the number of wires in the cable and whether they are twisted together in pairs or not. If the wires inside your cable are not twisted into pairs you can not use that cable for any kind of ethernet at all. If your cable does not have all four pairs it will not officially support Ethernet but it may still work at slower speeds. The table below breaks down some of the twisted pair cabling commonly used in homes and lists what they can be used for.
If you are still unsure what kind of cable you have, but you think that it might be adequate, the next step is to terminate the longest cable that you have and test it to see what kind of performance can be attained from the cable. If, after you have used the longest cable for some time and everything is working up to your requirements it is then safe to move on and set up the rest of the phone lines to run as Ethernet in your network.
The second major consideration to think about before you spend the time and resources to re terminate your phone lines as Ethernet cables is your network topology or design.
Each of the cables will run directly from the phone jack to a central location, or hub, without connecting to any other devices along the way. These are usually located in a closet or utility space and just look like a bundle of cables with some of the wires from inside the cable stripped back and twisted together with the line that connects to the local phone company or the demarcation point. If however there are fewer cables connected to the demarcation point then there are phone jacks in the house you have at least some dazy chained phone lines.
You may be able to terminate some of the sections together with a small performance decrease to make a smaller number of suitable Ethernet cables but it will not be possible to use the existing infrastructure to install Ethernet in all of the old phone locations. Take a look at the topology charts that I put together to illustrate some the the styles of network that I have commonly encountered.
I also showed that you can choose to only use parts of the original network and leave some of the phones in your home connected and working. You might find it helpful to sketch up your own topology diagram of your own house and label each of the locations with the names of the rooms were they can be found.
It can be tricky to track down where each of the cables go so if you are having trouble take a look at the article I wrote on tracking down mystery cables. Most people who research the topic of using phone lines as the infrastructure for an Ethernet network will come across the seemingly quick, easy, and cheaply available solution of using adapters to plug network equipment directly into a phone network.
In reality these devices are only really designed to let you connect a phone through an ethernet cable and not the other way around. In most situations a network device will not even connect using one of these adapters and even if it does you can expect poor stability and performance with a speed that is physically limited to one hundred Mbps or slower.
The only way to get a real stable Ethernet connection is to completely remove the old phone jacks and replace them with Ethernet jacks with the same or better category rating that you found on the outside of your cable earlier. The first question that needs to be answered when picking out what parts you will be installing in your new network is whether you want to use male RJ or female ends Ethernet Jacks. I would recommend that you use female ends at the locations around the house for a variety of reasons.
Whether you choose to install female ends at the central location next to your router or switch is more of stylistic choice but there are some things to consider first. Earlier in the article I mentioned that there are some situations where you will need to terminate together the Ethernet cables. To terminate two Ethernet cables together all you need to do is put a jack on one cable, install a RJ connector on the other cable, and snap them together. My phone lines were in a bundle with a few wired to each other.
One of the wires was from my home fiber connection into the house. Pay an electrician to separate the bundle and convert each cable and endplate to ethernet. Buy a simple network switch from someone like Netgear with enough ports for every cable you connect to it.
Have the electrician go to each room with a phone jack and change out the old phone connections with an ethernet adapter. Once complete, test that every jack when connected to a computer is transferring at high speeds the switch will show two lights on each port. Plug any routers and wifi points into your new ethernet port for faster networking. Like this: Like Loading Published by mathowie.
Published April 13, July 18, Previous Post Empathy and Invisibilia. Next Post The wisdom of the twitter crowds. Follow Following. A Whole Lotta Nothing Join other followers. Sign me up.
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