Need help with ethernet ports in house

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dhski04

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May 31, 2017
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I recently moved into a new house. There are several ethernet-sized jacks throughout that I am trying to activate. I opened up one of them - it has three jacks in the plate. Inside I found that they had hooked up two blue wires to one jack, two orange to the second jack, and two green wires to the last jack. Two brown wires were not used.

In the basement, I found a 5-jack plug where several ethernet-sized wires are connecting together, like a switch. There are no open ports.

I'm very confused as to what the previous owner was trying to accomplish here - any thoughts?
 
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First step is to make sure the wire is cat5e or better cable and not cat3 telephone cable. You are pretty much going to have to start over I suspect, luckily the wires are in the walls. You first need to locate both ends of each cable so you know which cable goes to which room. If the jacks really are rj45 ethernet jacks and not rj11 phone jacks you should be able to connect all 8 wires to one of the jacks. I suspect what is in the basement is a telephone patch panel...just my guess. You likely will need to replace that with a small ethernet patch panel. You could I suppose if you wanted to be cheap take the extra keystone out of the plates in the remote rooms and use on the basement wires. You could use a cheap 6 port...
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Scottray

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Jul 14, 2016
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Are the cables labeled cat5 cat 5e or cat6? Then, it's ethernet cabling. If it's not labeled as one of those, it's telephone cable. The way that it's connected on the ports, sounds like it was used for a multi-line phone system (ethernet cables can also be used for telephone). Note that RJ45 ethernet ports look very similar to RJ11 telephone ports. However, the telephone ports are slightly smaller than the ethernet ports.
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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First step is to make sure the wire is cat5e or better cable and not cat3 telephone cable. You are pretty much going to have to start over I suspect, luckily the wires are in the walls. You first need to locate both ends of each cable so you know which cable goes to which room. If the jacks really are rj45 ethernet jacks and not rj11 phone jacks you should be able to connect all 8 wires to one of the jacks. I suspect what is in the basement is a telephone patch panel...just my guess. You likely will need to replace that with a small ethernet patch panel. You could I suppose if you wanted to be cheap take the extra keystone out of the plates in the remote rooms and use on the basement wires. You could use a cheap 6 port face plate to hold them somewhat neatly.
 
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