Using house phone 6-wire cables for ethernet

Aug 29, 2018
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Here the situation, which I think many other people will have. (I am not a techy person of any kind., but I can put connectors on RJ45 cables, etc. and drill holes in walls.)

I recently moved to a new build house that was formerly used as a sales office by the builders. It is wired up the ying-yang. In my clothing closet there is a hole in the wall with 17 (!) 6-wire cables (3 twisted pairs) with the ends (st)ripped off that presumably lead to the wall jacks, 7 of which are in my double garage which is converted into an office/playroom/hobbies/dinosaur construction area. (Did I mention I have children?)

I have Comcast commercial cable near the back of the house, but would like a LAN wired connection at the front of the house where I can plug in my desktop plus another wifi router to give a better signal for T-mobile wifi on the driveway and in the front yard.

My understanding is that ethernet uses only 4 wires on pins 1,2,3,6. So as long as both ends of the cable have the same color wires, it should work for a 100 Mbps connection. This means that you could actually put a phone jack on one end of a cable to plug into a wall socket (as long as the wall socket is wired to pins 1,2,3,6) and a RJ 45 wired to pins 1,2,3,6 on the other end to plug into the computer.

However since the wire in my clothing closet will have to connect to an ethernet switch in the closet, the wiring on that end must be the same color sequence as at the back of the wall sockets on pins 1,2,3,6 to minimize the amount of work involved, though I could rewire them once I have identified the relevant sockets. (Right?).

A secondary question, which may be in the realm of fantasy, is this. Is it possible to make a 3.5 mm mono sound cable pair on the two spare wires that goes from computer sound jack to phone wall outlet and then from phone wall outlet to 3.5 mm plus at the other end, so as to put a speaker in the kitchen? About 50 feet.
 
What does the jacket say?

The jacket should run all the way to the end of both sides with minimal untwisting and the wire rated for ethernet. The best you can hope for is 100baset

I don't recommend trying to use it other than what it's rated for. They can't carry much power.
 
100 feet of AWG24 wire will have a resistance of about 2.5Ohms. WIth another small speaker, you could pump some sound into the kitchen.

I would rather investigate whether the cables converging into your closed are real Cat5/6 cables, or some ugly flat 6-wire phone cables.
 
Aug 29, 2018
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No, there is a whole bunch of writing once you clean the paint off the ends of the cables, but they are "verified" CAT 5E. I said before there were 6 wires, but I was wrong, there are actually 8 (4 twisted pairs). (I guess I was thinking that I only needed to wire up to pin 6 for ethernet as I do not have gigabyte internet coming into the home. Average download speed is 29 Mbps). Since the home was used as a sales office for the builders, it beats me why all the jacks are RJ11 type and not at least some RJ45.
 

As been answered over-and-over in this forum.

RJ11 'coz application intention telephony.

CAT5 cables because often, believe it or not, are widely available, contractors often have a roll in the truck, relatively inexpensive. No reason to spend time and effort looking for old phones cables. Call it CAT5e=Jack of All Trades.
 

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