Phone and ethernet over same CAT5e - not working

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GT-Rex

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Jul 1, 2013
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My house is home run with CAT5e to every room with a single RJ-45 jack in each room. Phone is being delivered over this network and I have confirmed that dial tone is available in every room. (This confirms pins 4/5 are correct everywhere.)

However, when I plug in an ethernet cable from my iMac into its nearest jack, I lose dial tone throughout the house. I first thought this was a 1GbE issue, so I manually set the interface to 100Mbps, but that still causes a problem with dial tone.

Moreover, I never am able to establish a link between the iMac and a laptop in another room or to a GbE port on my home router. I have disconnected every phone in the house. I've even gone so far as to disconnect the POTS service at the side of the house just to make sure it wasn't some interference there. Nothing I do will establish a link.

Any thoughts? FWIW, I checked the home run panel and all of the wires are properly connected based on color. There is no apparent reason (to me) why I shouldn't be able to get ethernet link. Ideally, I'd like to use the jacks in some rooms for phone and others for ethernet. Again, this should not be a problem at all if I limit the computer network to 100Mbps.

Thanks!
 
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makkem

makkem

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Jan 22, 2012
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Hi
i'm from the uk so there may be some slight phone differences.
However i have not come across phone and ethernet sharing the same cable.
Connecting each room for a phone would mean basically connecting all the wires together (in parallel) and connecting to incoming line.
Connecting each room for ethernet would mean each cable being connected indivdually to a switch or router via its own port.
Also the presence of voltage when you get dial tone or when the phone rings is liable to cause problems with the ethernet.
When your router shares a phone line for broadband you typically have to fit a microfilter to each phone to prevent interference.
You will be losing the dial tone because the imac is shorting out the phone line.You should be careful doing this as it could damage the NIC in the computer.
I have just checked and the dial tone voltage in the US is about 50 volts,this is easily enough to fry a NIC you should check that your imac is still working over ethernet.
 
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wacabletech

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Dec 15, 2012
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So there is a way to do this but I think you may be confused, are you punching down the cat5 wire to ONE jack and trying to use the jack for both becasue this will not work. You need to punch down a single pair say the blue or brown pair to the PHONE jacks, and then generally the orange and green to the data jacks. As long as colors are consistent you can actually interchange these. However, for simplicity I recommend following it to the T. The other side is the start end, you cannot have the phone and data coming from one device or through a router/switch, that's a data only thing.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-your-House-Run-both-ethernet-and-phone-over-/

The other side of this is that you cannot start the wires on an Ethernet connection and expect phone dial tone/voltage to appear on them they must connect to a PHONE pair in the smart panel or wherever you are doing this separate from the data devices.

If you can explain in more detail I think you can get this taken care of but a lot of specifics are missing right now.
 
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