User in a Junction Box Home Needs Help!

CecilyBug

Honorable
Jan 5, 2013
5
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10,510
So, after the fates chose this for me, I'm living back home with my father as a near-30 grown woman. Oh boy, did I open a can of worms for myself when I started trying to figure out how the networking in this house was set up...

My room is upstairs, and my computer's running on a basic wireless card and connecting to the household network via the DSL modem in the other spare bedroom nextdoor. The internet is pretty slow for DSL (capping out at about 150kb/s), but I attribute this to living out in a relatively rural area. The trouble I'm having is with communicating to other devices within the house.

My dad built this house back around '05, before wireless networking had quite taken off with the masses, and so he wired the house for Ethernet use. There are phone, TV (coax), and Ethernet (RJ45) outlets in most of the rooms, and they all hub together in my father's junction box downstairs in a closet next to the living room.

I just downloaded DirecTV's computer program to allow me to watch recorded shows off the DVR downstairs - it was unwatchable, because it was either chugging so slow or skipping too fast to comprehend what was going on. The Receiver/DVR is wired up to the house's junction box for internet connectivity via one of the many Ethernet outlets. There doesn't seem to be any router or switch at the junction box, just an array of stripped wires all hooked up to their own space on the junction. I...don't understand how this can work, for one - an explanation of what is going on would be appreciated; my father's explanation isn't very helpful: "It doesn't ~do~ anything! It just connects them all up. It doesn't process anything, it doesn't have any power, it just connects it all." For another, how can I get data to move smoothly within the house, with the most relevant being getting my computer and the DVR to play nice?
 
it would really help if you would have a picture of that junction box.

usually you should have a RJ45 for each of the ethernet connections in the rooms.

if that is the case, you would use a network switch and connect them via network cables.

where is the DSL modem and where is the DVR? how are they connected to each other?
 

CecilyBug

Honorable
Jan 5, 2013
5
0
10,510


My father opened the box up to show me, but sealed it back up again before I could snap a picture...
All of the Ethernet jacks throughout the house all hub at this junction box. The DSL modem is in the room next to mine (upstairs bedroom), with a phone line in, an Ethernet line out directly to the computer that's in that room, and an Ethernet line out to the room's Ethernet jack. There are two DVRs in the house, but the one I'm trying to interact with is downstairs in the living room; it is connected to the house's network via an Ethernet plug. They are connected to each other somehow in the junction box - I don't know how: there's no switch or router as far as I can tell.