Cat5 to Cat6 upgrade. And can I use Cat5e for phone?

[dbhosttexas]

For years my home network has been a hodge podge of category 5 (what the prior owner put in) and cat5e (what I put in) cable. My hardware upgrades to gigabit switches and NICs has proved the limits of the cat 5 cable, and instead of piecing it together, I have decided to undertake a whole replacement / move project.

In the process of this project, I will be racking all of my network gear in what will be the new home office. (the smallest bedroom in the house). My wall mount board approach is showing it's limits and is needing some upgrading.

My plan is this...

#1. Mount the wall mounted relay rack in it's spot in the new office.
#2. Utilize the existing cat5 / 5e to back pull poly pull cord through the walls.
#3. Create new openings for new, never had them ports, and pull poly pull cord through wall.
#4. Pull cat 6 through all port destinations up into new office.
#5. Terminate all runs to Cat 6 patch panel, and cat 6 keystones and test.
#6. Migrate and rack modem, router, and an Ooma Telo (on rack shelf), gigabit switch, patch panel, KVM, a second shelf with 2x8 port gigabit switches (my iSCSI SAN fabrics) and the UPS protecting all of this.
#7. Relocate central hub point for existing cat5 / 5e pulls to the phone demarc and make my connections, disconnecting from any possible telco connections, and tagging telco connection out. Pull cat 5e line from Ooma Telo device to demarc.
#8 Replace cat5e keystones with RJ11 keystones.
#9. Replace any existing phone station wire drops with cat5e (several of them have damaged wire).
#10. Move cluster, SAN, workstation hardware to LAN rack. (Yeah I have one of those cheapie wire bakers rack style LAN racks, it was dirt cheap and solves the where to put the computers problem!).
#11. Move computer desk, chair etc... and complete office migration.

The biggest question is, is this doable. Particularly reusing cat5 / 5e to carry voice data? I have a spare partial box of cat5e that has been sitting around for ages, and needs to be used. I want all cat6 in my data network, so the 5e needs a purpose for its existence...

 

[bill001g]

You can run analog voice over cat3 so cat5 or cat5e is more than good enough. There is no reason to replace the rj45 keystones with rj11. It the "old" days where 100m was all there was you would build split jacks that could run phone or data. You would cable pins 1,2,3,6 normally as data and cable pins 4,5 as voice. You would then build a split cable in the demark location cable pins 4,5 to the phone connection and cable the other to a switch. On the far end if you plug in a rj11 plug into the rj45 jacks the middle pins line up and you could use voice. If you plugs in a data cable it doesn't use pin 4,5 so it didn't matter.

I would just use your rj45 jacks as is and plug the phone cable into them.

Just on a side note you may not be able to pull the cables back some installers (many time a code requirement) staple the cable to the studs.

 

[dbhosttexas]

Thanks for the input. The RJ11s are something I already have, and I want to change to RJ11 from RJ45 so there is no confusion between data and voice networks.

As far as back pulling goes. At least in my installation, all of the low voltage stuff, telephone, coax, and data, are loose in the walls. I already checked...