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Question : Problem: Running your telephone over a CAT5 cable
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Hello experts!
I just bought a house with CAT5 cabling run to about ever room. The are wired up to run regular phones. I have successfully wired up some jacks that run the phones over two of the wires and networking through the rest. I have two questions...
1) Will this type of connection only support 100MBps speeds since two of the wires are used for phone?
2) Also, is there some type of box that I can buy that will run the traffic properly for this type of wire configuration.
The current box I have now came with the house and does not seem to support this type of wiring. Any information you can provide that would allow me to have telephone and network to the same room over a single wire would be great! Thanks!
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Answer : Problem: Running your telephone over a CAT5 cable
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I agree, my first step would be to just try it out with the phone on the extra pairs. It costs nothing and takes little effort but has a pretty good chance of working just fine. Use a wall plate with jacks that are adjacent so you can keep the 'non-spec' impact to a minimum.
I would expect that even with some losses your networking would still outperform typical wireless networking by a large margin. Thats assuming the wireless networking is actually working good.
If there is a noticable problem you really have not lost much and can go ahead with other options. I would still probably run extra wires for either the phone or network or use cordless phones - whichever is easier or cheaper - rather that go with IP telephoney at home.
Voip or IP telephoney is just a lot more complex than a dialtone down a plain copper wire. Running multiple extensions with IP equipment is not so simple as analog phones either.
There are analog 'adapters' which provide FXO ports - which allow you to connect a phone line. This converts the signal to IP but the one catch is that this is a point to point arrangement. So a 1 FXO port adapater would allow for a single IP phone connection. You can also use a FXS adapter which would take the IP phone signal back to analog to allow a regular old phone to be used. Without a phone system or PBX you more or less just directly map the IP phone or FXS port directly to the FXO port.
Cost is typically around $50-90 per port, you can see a variety of different makes and models at the link below. This requires no monthly service, just the hardware.
http://www.voipsupply.com/index.php?cPath=96
There are also FXO/FXS gateways which are multiport versions - 2,4 or more ports.
To properly manage multiple phone sets and lines you would need a phone system. Simple voip gateways dont have the abilty to manage call traffic. So for example having all your phones ring on a incoming call would be a problem. You might be able to trick a mult port FXO gateway by hooking all the ports to the same phone line. Never tried it myself.
Though a PBX is more complex it is not necessarily all that expensive. There are a few open source software PBX's that will run quite well on almost any old computer and are fairly simple to setup.
http://www.trixbox.org/
http://www.asterisknow.org/
Any type of PBX is going to give you a ton of features, probably way more than you even want for home use. If you actually want the extra features it can be well worth the effort. The downside is a computer is now needed to make or receive phone calls as compared to a simple copper wire with a dial tone.
Low end 'appliance' type IP PBX's are going to cost around $600 - 1200 range and up. These have the benefit of being 'plug and play'.
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