 |  Question by Dan Anderson posted 10 Oct 2005 | RJ11 to RJ45 | I've recently moved into a different house and am trying to get the kinks worked out of my network. The only drop point for my wireless router is in the oppisite corner of the house and I am not able to get a strong enough signal to stream video to my new digital media server. Running Cat5 or other cable is not an option as we rent. However, there are phone lines in almost every room and my media server can be hooked up via an ethernet cable. Can you tell me if it's possible to pass my data through the phne line via an RJ45 to RJ11 converter(the current phone[rj11?] jacks have 4 prongs)If so, can you point me to someplace where I can pick up some off the-shelf RJ11 to RJ45 conveters that will do the trick? |  |  Answer by Joseph Golan posted 11 Oct 2005 | Dear Dan,
When you said that the current jacks have 4 prongs I immediately envision an old portable telephone jack which was a 4 prong device with the pins arranged in a square-ish pattern with each side measuring about 3/4" between pins. If you do have an RJ-14 (RJ-11 is actually 1 pair and RJ-14 is two pair) then you may be able to do this but there are too many variable for me to give you direction from behind a computer screen.
Just because you see 4 pins or prongs does not mean that there are conductors attached to each one. Also it was a common practice for the telephone outlets to be run from one to the other (spliced) which would not be suitable for data.
If your telephone cable is at least twisted pair (not the old 4 conductor, red, green, black, yellow) then you may have a shot but it will depend on many other factors, actual type of cable, home run'ed (not spliced), termination hardware, quality of installation, etc.
While I have been successful in getting 100BaseT Ethernet to run on cat 3 due to short runs and everything else I mentioned above, it would be an outside chance to do it here.
Sincerely,
Joseph Golan, RCDD
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