Cat 5 Cable question

[C. Alan]

The house I am buying has 4 twisted pair cat 5 cable pulled from one cetral location to all of the room in the house. I could set up a server to run this small lan system, but I have a dumb question first. I know 100mb Lan only uses 2 pair of twisted cables. Can I use the other 2 pair to operate a standard phone line? Or do I have to choose between telephone or LAN???
Thanks,
C. Alan

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[pbharris]

hello,
sure, you can use lines in the cat5 cable along with phone lines. there may be crosstalk when you are on the phone, termination, shileding and how far they have to go will impact stuff. but i know people do it all the time.
paul

[C. Alan]

I know the cable is not shielded between pairs. I will try it with phone combined with data. Thanks
--Alan

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[hndpaul]

generally you would run some cable to an access point in the wall (wall mounted or flush) and then have two IDCs in there; one for your data cable, and one for your telephone. i wouldn't recommend your using the same cable for both jobs- the data loss may not be worth it--that's if your data actually gets there in one piece. If you are running SWITCHED ethernet, it will use two pairs- one for send and one for receive, and because these are unshielded, you could have many problems that won't be traceable without some serious equipment.

Just my opinion....

Paul, UK
Cisco Networking Academy

[Nandy]

Paul is right. The telephone lines have up to 90 volts surge(when the telephone is ringing). You will have crossover, that is a given. You might get lucky and the crossover wont kill your data completely. The best thing is not to use it. But i won't tell you either that you will have data/speed problems all the time...

Nandy

[bugfix]

Once you've got the cable running through your house its much (MUCH!) easier to pull new cable through than starting fresh so its probably worth running a seperate cable for a phone.

duggeB

[Dru Lee Parsec]

When wiring the house make sure of 2 things:

1. Do not untwist the wires more than half an inch when attaching the cables to the wall jack.

2. Look at the jack. There will be wiring diagrams for T568A and T568B. You want to wire them to the T568B standard.

That should keep you from having dead outlets.

[PAEricksen]

If you try to split the pairs you WILL have data loss. How much I can't say. you might get by at 10MB maybe less. you won't really notice much loss when you are talking on the phone, but you might notice a severe loss on your network. Best bet is to use one 4PR for Data and another for voice. It shouldn't be hard to pull 2 cables where one already exists, just remember to use the existing one as a pull cable. make sure it is tight and wont come apart when you are pulling it up the wall. by the way, if you do decide to use one wire for both voice and data, you need pins 1 2 3 6 for data.

Peter

[This message has been edited by PAEricksen (edited 18 November 2000).]