Hi All
I’ve seen a number of threads now where people are asking about cat5e and putting this through their homes.
The same process can be used for cat6/6a but this has its own wiring standards that i will admit to not knowing well enough to write about.
With this in mind I thought I’d write a little bit about cat5e anyway.
Please amend or add to as you like, even rewrite, I don’t claim to be a know it all. Just thought I’d offer a little bit off advice point people in what I think is the right direction.
The pictures have been drawn (badly I will add) as soon as I get on job that is close to what has been described I’ll take a few pics.
Please also note I do not work for BT or any other UK main land telecom provider.
With that said lets crack on,
What can cat5e be used for,
Voice and data.
If used in the home for voice you can in fact run up to 4 separate phone numbers down the one wire, of course this leaves no room for errors or bad wires and means that wire can not used to provide a ringing circuit.
If used for data you can achieve up to 1gb transfer rates of the newer standard of cat6 will give 2.5gb and cat6a is expected to give up to 10gb. But these are still being implemented and are not considered as robust as cat5e.
How should you wire up the house
The ideal way is to star wire, this means to bring all the wires back to one single point. The advantage of doing this means if a fault occurs in a particular cable only the socket it is attached to is affected. It also means that if you wish to change the use of a particular socket it can all be done in one location.
One thing to bare in mind when doing this is where in the home your outside feed comes in, do you have underground cable coming in from the floor or are you fed from a pole that comes in from the attic. Can you get a cable from this location to where you wish to place your hub?
Lets make an example to then. We have a nice 4-bedroom house with a kitchen, dinning room and lounge. That’s a total of 6 rooms that we would like to have potential for phone points or data points.
How would we wire this?
In the ideal world we would like as many points in each room as we can with the most room for error. So for each socket in the room we would have one cable going back to our chosen hub.
So lets say each bedroom has 2 points for a connection, each with 2 points. One phone one data. That makes 16 wires; we have 2 in the kitchen, 1 in the dinning room and 2 in the lounge. That brings our total up to 26 wires.
What the hell do I do with all these wires?
So remember half are going to be phone and half are going to be data. The ones we are going to make data we can stick some RJ45 connectors on to the ends and plug in to a switch giving the normal data communication to a server or router (The internet)
The other 13 we are going to put in to a Krone 301A box FIG.1 . Waz that then?
This is what BT and other teleco’s use for terminating multiple cables and making use of them.
In the box, you get ten, ten pair strips FIG.2. It just so happens you get 4 pairs in a cat5 cable.
This means per strip and keeping it neat and tidy we can get 2 cables on.
How to wire this? FIG2
Telephone standards dictate that the colour code goes like this, White blue/blue, White orange/orange, white green/green and white brown/brown.
Taking a Cyclops cable cutter make 2 turns using the shallow side of the cutter, pull off the out sleeve, you need to leave about 4 to 5 inches slack, this will allow you to take the strip off in the future with out pulling cables off the back,
Starting at point one and using a krone punch tool, punch down the blue pair and so forth. Miss out number five and punch down the blue pair of your next cable on to number six.
Do this for all your cables!
If you are good, you will have labelled each cable after pulling it through. Krone strip labels can added to each strip detailing which cable goes where.
Then it’s just a matter of jumpering them all up so service is sent to each room FIG.3.
Using standard jumper wire connect up the blue pair of each cable and the dark orange of each cable, this creates a working pair (the blues) and a ringing circuit (the orange)
Now this is done it will need to be connected to your out side feed, depending on how old your house is or what was done, this might be as simple as taking a feed from first socket in the house or direct from another Krone box provided by BT, now the important part. If you touch the first socket or termination Krone box and muck it all up, chances are BT or your provider will charge you as this is normally classed as theirs.
What if you don’t want to run two cables to every room but you still want to choice of having data or phone service to the room.
Then a patch panel can be used.
You can put a patch panel in however you like with many ways of using it, this is the way I will talk about.
If all your rooms have only one socket going to them you may wish to run all the cables directly back to the patch panel (We shall use the above house again) 6 rooms in total. Most patch panels have 10 or more ports on them for you to punch your cables directly on to. Keep all the house cables to left, starting from point one.
On the other side, punch down as many cables to make a one for one mirror of the other side in this case 6.
These are then made off on to a Krone box as detailed above and link up in the same way.
What you have now done is created 6 ports that go around the house and 6 ports that each provide telephone service. It is then a matter of connecting your house ports to either a switch/router or a phone port to dictate what each room will get.
Bear in mind that if data ports and sockets are used, they are wired up differently to telephone lines. You may need to alter the wire configuration in either or both to allow communication to happen.
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