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Modernizing old house network wiring - Part 2 - CAT5 Preparation for Analysis

My home has a nest of cable TV and CAT5 wires.  My goal is to figure out if I can use any of my old home wiring for modern networking.

As I mentioned last time, I'm planning to keep any viable CAT5 cabling and any decent cable tv coax cables.  But it's all in a nest of unlabelled wires, and I have no idea if they work.  It's a mess, but I aim to figure it all out.

CAT5: from Analog Telephone to Ethernet


I am very confident that I will never have a need for analog phone lines in my house.  I would much prefer to have Ethernet.  So my goal is to convert any RJ11 jack to an RJ45-style Ethernet jack.  But first I need to see if the cables inside the jacks are viable.  Since Ethernet is one of my primary goals, I'm starting with the CAT5.

The CAT5 wiring was put into my house about 20 years ago, but it is exclusively configured for analog telephone lines.  There are a bunch of RJ11-style telephone jacks around the house.  In the basement, six CAT5 cables appear in the basement.  For each CAT5 cable, 2 of the 8 conductors (blue & white/blue) are screwed into an old-school terminal block.  From there, two short wires connect the terminal block to the primary telephone company interface box.

All this analog stuff is going to end today.

I'm going to disconnect all the wiring from the telephone company, and then I'm going to open up all the wall jacks.  From there, I'll need to identify and test the wiring to each jack.

Step 1: Disconnecting the CAT5 from the telephone network.

My first step is to disconnect the house from the telephone company.  This is pretty easy: I just unplug the house from the telephone company's jack and cut the wires going to the block.  Done!  Now I just have six loose CAT5 cables in the basement with no connectors.  Easy!

The old terminal block goes into the parts bin.

Step 2: Open up the wall phone jacks

Next, I opened up each of the RJ11 phone jacks.  The great news is that the same type of blue plastic CAT5 cables are in each of the RJ11 jacks, so it's likely that they are the same cables.  Unhappily, there are eight jacks and only six CAT5 cables in the basement, so at least some of them are wired in a way inappropriate for Ethernet.  I'll figure that out later.

Since I don't plan on using any of the RJ11 jacks, I just cut them off with some wire cutters.

Step 3: Prepare cables for testing

Now I have a bundle of CAT5 cables in the basement, and a single CAT5 cable in each the wall jacks... all without connectors.  I want to test the cables, but my network cable tester requires RJ45-style connectors.  Now what?

I conclude that the easiest way to do this is to crimp an RJ45 style connector to every CAT5 cable end I can find.  Then I can use a cable tester to identify which cable is which, and to figure out if the wires in each of the cables are any good.

RJ45 connectors can be very inexpensive (often under 10¢ each... or under 2¢ each if you buy in larger quantities),  so if any of the cables are bad, I won't be wasting much money.

Ethernet Wiring standards

So before I start crimping, I have a choice:  Which Ethernet wiring standard am I going to use for my house?

There are two popular standards, 568A and 568B.  568A is very common throughout the world and in US government facilities.  But for some weird reason, 568B is common in the US in non-government facilities.  It doesn't really matter which standard you use, as long as you stick with a single standard .

Since I'm in the US, and since my house is a non-government facility, I went with 568B. 

After I crimped a few of these it became very easy to remember the order.  For my 568B cables, it alternates white/solid like this:
  1. white/orange
  2. orange
  3. white/green
  4. blue
  5. white/blue
  6. green
  7. white/brown
  8. brown

Tools Required

I haven't crimped RJ45 connectors before, but today I learned that it isn't very difficult. I use the following tools to install connectors onto my CAT5 cables:
  • A basic RJ45 crimper
  • A wire stripper
  • Hemostats
  • Scissors
 

Crimping

In the basement, I crimped RJ45 connectors onto each of the six CAT5 cables.  I also crimped RJ45 connectors onto the eight CAT5 cables exposed at each jack.   At first it was a little painful and tedious, but it got easier as I gained practice.

Now it takes me about two minutes to crimp an RJ45 connector onto CAT5 cable.  Here is my basic process:
  1. Strip off about 1 inch of the CAT5 casing
  2. Trim off the little nylon fibers that are in the casing
  3. Untwist the 4 pairs
  4. Straighten each of the 8 wires
  5. Put the wires in the correct order (for me, 568B order)
  6. Use hemostats to clamp the 8 wires, keeping them nice and straight.
  7. Trim the wires to equal length, so about 1.5 cm of wire is exposed
  8. Remove the hemostat
  9. Slide on the RJ45 connector
  10. Check wire order.  Check it again.  Make sure it's right!
  11. Crimp on the RJ45 connector

Next time...

Today I got as far as crimping on all my connectors.  I feel pretty good about it.  Next time I will identify and test each cable. 

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