Hi everyone. I found this forum while I was trying to educate myself on the cat5e wiring in the house I just purchased, so please excuse my lack of posting history. With your help, I hope to learn more about networking and become a member of this community. Let me give you a little background on my issue, forgive the long-windedness.
I just bought a house that was prewired with Cat5e, supposedly for telephone and networking. Each room has a drop with cat5e ports and the master closet has a panel with a bunch of cat5e and coaxial cables. I'm trying to figure out how to use the drops in each room in order to facilitate file transfers and HD video streaming. However, it seems that the "prewire" job was left incomplete and that the cat5e wiring is not operational yet. The previous owner did not use the cat5e, so he has no idea how it works or whether it works.
Here is an album with pictures of the panel, cabling and drops: http://imgur.com/a/ftEub
I'm a novice with networking stuff, but it seems to me that the builder (a) did a really sloppy job and (b) did not terminate any of the cat5e cables at the panel so that the drops throughout the house would be usable. The wiring on the cables in the panel is either wrapped back up around each cable, ends in a circular plastic cap or ends in a bigger yellow cap (by the way, what are the circular plastic caps and big yellow caps in the pictures?). In order words, they are plugged into nothing. I think the solution is to terminate each cable at the panel with an RJ-45 connector, plug those connectors into a patch panel, then into a switch. Plug the router into the switch and I should have a working network where all the drops throughout the house will have Internet capability and be connected on the network. Does that sound right? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am pretty lost on this stuff.
I just bought a house that was prewired with Cat5e, supposedly for telephone and networking. Each room has a drop with cat5e ports and the master closet has a panel with a bunch of cat5e and coaxial cables. I'm trying to figure out how to use the drops in each room in order to facilitate file transfers and HD video streaming. However, it seems that the "prewire" job was left incomplete and that the cat5e wiring is not operational yet. The previous owner did not use the cat5e, so he has no idea how it works or whether it works.
Here is an album with pictures of the panel, cabling and drops: http://imgur.com/a/ftEub
I'm a novice with networking stuff, but it seems to me that the builder (a) did a really sloppy job and (b) did not terminate any of the cat5e cables at the panel so that the drops throughout the house would be usable. The wiring on the cables in the panel is either wrapped back up around each cable, ends in a circular plastic cap or ends in a bigger yellow cap (by the way, what are the circular plastic caps and big yellow caps in the pictures?). In order words, they are plugged into nothing. I think the solution is to terminate each cable at the panel with an RJ-45 connector, plug those connectors into a patch panel, then into a switch. Plug the router into the switch and I should have a working network where all the drops throughout the house will have Internet capability and be connected on the network. Does that sound right? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I am pretty lost on this stuff.