Our Home Network « randyglenn.ca

When we (my family and I) moved into our current house nearly 5 years ago, there were a few issues that we knew we had to take care of – the poor furnace, the lack of a proper bedroom for me, the colours of the walls, etc. One thing we’d counted on waiting to finish, though, was the wiring – while we wanted to properly network this house and avoid the “50ft patch cords through vents and tucked under baseboards” we’d used before, there were more pressing issues.

The rather strong AM reception on nearly every telephone in the house changed that pretty quick.

When we started looking into the phone wiring in the house, thing got pretty murky pretty fast. We found that some jacks were using the standard Green and Red pair, and a couple used Yellow and Black – but we could NOT find where they switched. One phone wire ran under a baseboard and under the bathroom floor – the tile bathroom floor. The phone wire was embedded in the thinset cement. Other rooms had the standard “dorm room” wiring job, holes drilled in walls for phone wire, with 4 baseboard jacks in one room alone. Fixing it was proving to be too time consuming and too difficult if we were going to be replacing it anyways, so we headed off to Sayal Electronics in Burlington and came home with two spools of CAT5E cable – Blue for Data, Grey for Voice – a spool of RG6 Coax cable, and assorted hardware (keystone jacks, keystone plates, and compression crimp cable plugs).

This upgrade had been planned for a while – we’d picked up an inexpensive compression crimper on a trip to the US since models that cheap weren’t available north of the 49th, and I’d obtained a few Leviton media panels fairly cheaply on eBay, all prior to moving in. So when the decision was made to go ahead, we were ready. We slowly started running wires to the rooms that were easiest to get to in order to get good at setting up the cables, and wound up rerouting and redoing a few runs as we went. About a year and a half after moving in we started a big basement renovation that required we be very careful with our already-installed cables, but also gave us the opportunity to pre-wire the basement for surround sound and build in a cabinet for the equipment to go. It’s this part of the story that we’re working on now – adding AV wiring from the cabinet to behind the TV so that we can clean up that area and make use of the new surround sound system we got for the basement.

(The system in question was a prize in the Rogers Customer Appreciation Event – thanks Rogers, we appreciate you too!)

The state of our home network now is a great deal better than it was when we moved in:

Each room has a wallplate with, at minimum, two CAT5E runs – one voice, one data – and one RG6 cable run. Most have two RG6 runs in case we want to move to satellite TV. Each of these is a keystone wallplate.
Every cable run is a “home run” back to a media panel in the basement. Each CAT5 cable and RG6 cable terminates at a patch panel. All of the voice jacks are on one patch panel and all of the data ones are on another – and jack 1 on the Voice panel is the same destination as jack 1 on the Data panel.
There are about 12 panels around the house – every bedroom, the living room, family room, study and a few in the basement.
Every cable run is documented as to where it goes and takes a rather direct path to get there.

A bit of a footnote on the phone wiring issue: when we were doing some further renovations, we drilled into a joist in the basement, and saw phone wire on the other side. We pulled about 30 feet out before it stopped – all of which was live. This possibly explains how our house acted as a giant antenna…

Some photos of our current setup:

One of the keystone wallplates. Two coax, one RJ45 CAT5E, and one RJ11 for telephone

The basement data centre: two SMC switches (ugh), the Linksys WRT54GS router (hacked), RCA cable modem. Underneath is the homemade Cable TV patch panel, and under THAT are the Leviton media centres – Ethernet on the left, Phone on the right.