Hard-wiring old house for ethernet, maybe new phone line? (DSL, wireless, working)

[BigDGeek]

Please forgive me if some of this sounds silly, but I have never done this before and do not know much about networking.

I am closing on a 52 year old pier and beam house in less than 2 weeks. A friend has offered to help me wire it for ethernet with Cat 5e cable. He wants to run two lines apiece to four different rooms (all bedrooms and the living room), with all of these lines meeting together at a patch panel in the closet where the DSL router will eventually be. I will be the one in the crawl space pulling the wire.

So far so good, but there is no phone jack in that closet. I will be getting u-verse and ATT DSL at that house and he says if a new phone line has to be run (it does), then the ATT installers will do it. I think they will charge me an arm and a leg to run phone lines through my crawlspace in the middle of summer.

What would you do in my situation? Keep in mind I have never run phone lines before and am not all that familiar with the terminology. Thanks!

[swagger]

Just pull one more cable for the phone. Run it from wherever it comes into the home to the closet. Pick two of the twisted pairs and wire in the jack. Easy peasy.

[harry chickpea]

IIRC it is a fixed fee for installing new service, but like swagger says, you can run the wire yourself once you have it. There are standards to which twisted pair gets hooked where, so just terminate the cable near the demarcation point between the phone company lines and your home lines, then once they have selected the pair and have a dial tone on the demarcation socket, choose the same pair to wire in at your wall outlet. You can usually hook in a couple of POTS phones to a line without problems. When you get into multiple phone devices, there are other issues involved.

[southgeorgia]

white/blue - blue pair is the standard for line 1 voice; on your wall jacks this will be blue = red, white/blue = green.

[harry chickpea]

However, it is possible to connect the pair backward. There is a DC current that goes through them. That's why I like to wait before hooking up the wall jack. It's easy to see the configuration on the demarc jack and then copy it.

[southgeorgia]

Originally Posted by harry chickpea

However, it is possible to connect the pair backward. There is a DC current that goes through them. That's why I like to wait before hooking up the wall jack. It's easy to see the configuration on the demarc jack and then copy it.

white/blue = tip, blue = ring.

If the phone company does it in reverse, they are mistaken.

these are published standards.

[Bowie]

Originally Posted by BigDGeek

I will be getting u-verse and ATT DSL at that house and he says if a new phone line has to be run (it does), then the ATT installers will do it. I think they will charge me an arm and a leg to run phone lines through my crawlspace in the middle of summer.

AT&T charges a flat rate for U-Verse installation. I recommend you do that first and see what cables they pull as part of that installation before you pull any of your own.

[Busch71]

Originally Posted by southgeorgia

white/blue = tip, blue = ring.

If the phone company does it in reverse, they are mistaken.

these are published standards.

This is 100% right on the money. Any other way of wiring it is wrong and does not meet spec.

[pjoseph2]

Wondering..In these days where wireless data (802.11a/b/g/n) and voice (cordless, not cellular in this case) is the norm, why wire a house at all?

As long as the telco termination point is protected from the elements.

[MikeJaquish]

Originally Posted by pjoseph2

Wondering..In these days where wireless data (802.11a/b/g/n) and voice (cordless, not cellular in this case) is the norm, why wire a house at all?

As long as the telco termination point is protected from the elements.

There would be a LOT fewer conversations about wireless network security if we all just hard-wired.
I will be hard-wiring soon for that and also for reliable speed and access.