Hi,

Some weeks ago, I started a thread about wiring a house with cat5/lan :

http://www.scoobynet.co.uk/bbs/thread.asp?threadid=88451

What I need to know now is what network topology is should be. ie, star or daisy chain or whatever????

Also - does a phone line work perfectly ok in a lan socket, and you just need a patch board to connect it to the main phone line???

cant think of its name lol,Mines just every Pc has its own cable to the router!

I think yours is star then - that's what I thought would be best.....

I would run a star to a patch panel.

Come off the back of the master socket as ext. wiring and then all your surge protection / mastering crap has been done... just get a Secondary RJ45 --> BT Adaptor... or buy PABX / Mastering and cut out all the rubbish in there.. Wouldnt bother doing voice over cat5 at home... As you are going to have do some mad patching if you want more than one ext on the same number.. www.minitran.co.uk sell the adaptors.

David

Best Bet is all Outlets come to one patch panel (i.e. Star). Locate your hub/switch etc there and patch away.

Telephones are an interesting one. Within an office environment you'd have PABX which can use extensions slightly differently. For an analoguse system, each extension would then be patched to the Cat5 port and an appropriate Cat5/Telephone adaptor. Domestic phones and extensions are a bit different however and I havent beean able to find appropriate adaptors specifically for "domestic" extensions. (You could make some up - RJ45 to Telephone socket) but seems extra hassle to me.

I'm currently doing my house and my solution is to use these Extension modules here at the wall plate - with cat5 cabled to them. At the patch panel then I'll take a cable from the master phone socket (or exsiting convenient extenion) and punch it down on the patch panel across 4 adjacent sockets in parallel. Each can then be patched to the appropraite Wall port. If at some point I want to swap a phone wall point to LAN then I just need to swap the module at the wall to a Cat5 Outlet and repatch it centrally.

Hard to explain really. You could also take the cat5 from the wallport direct to a standard telephone style junction box. (i.e. just treat the Cat5 like normal extension wiring) but this seems a little more inflexible to me (would require both ends changing if use were to change)

Deano

Edit to say: Dont mess around inside the BT Master socket. If everything you do is treated as "extesnion" wiring you shouldn't be able to cause too much damage. Be careful with Phones in Lan Ports and PCs in Phone Ports etc... :)


[Edited by dsmith - 5/7/2002 10:10:02 AM]