home network and telephone wiring

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 Question by Mark Cichoracki posted 01 Nov 2004
 home network and telephone wiring
I am building my new home and am doing all my own wiring. I ran cat5e to every room and have single runs terminating in the basement. I plan to use a patch panel to terminate the 2 sets of the cat5e wires. I was told to assign the orange and green pairs for the network and the other 2 pairs for telephone. At the patch panel the wiring order is different than the standard "B" setup on the patch cords. Do these connections on the patch panel cross over each other internally to provide pins 1,2,3,6 for the network?(note only 4 wires will be used on the rj45 jacks). Also, on the other 4 wires for the telephone, I was also going to use the same patch panel(different ports) and use jumper wires on the rear of the panel to connect all the telephone lines together(because they do not have to be seperate connections). Will this telephone setup work with a patch panel or does the internal circut board mess things up??
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 Answer by Dmitri Abaimov posted 01 Nov 2004
Dear Mark,

It is not recommended to split a cable between a phone and a PC. Maybe not so much for interference but the complexity of connections that you correctly identified, as well as limiting the future usefulness of such cabling. There will be applications in the very near future, such as Gigabit Ethernet, that will require all four pairs for a single connection, so you may find yourself running cables again in couple years. Since you are going to pull cables, it is best from every stand point to pull two or more cables now rather that getting back to the installation hassle later. The cost of getting back to installing cables in couple years will be greater than just buying an extra box of cable now.

We have a document put together to explain specifics of cabling design and installation in residential homes, called Home Cabling Guide (http://www.cabling-design.com/resources/documents/residential.html) There is a sample chapter at that page, you are welcome to take a look at it or purchase the whole document to learn more about residential cabling.

Sincerely,
Dmitri Abaimov, RCDD

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