Question regarding phone lines (1 Viewer)

I am having a house built, and in an effort to save money, I am doing some of the wiring inside the home, mainly the network, cable, and speaker wire. I am having the builder just put in the standard 2 phone lines. My question is: Will I be able to run my own phone lines to all the rooms from the demarc box, assuming I do it before the drywall goes up?

you can certainly run more lines for phones to all your rooms. If I were doing it, I would use cat 5 cable for the phones too. Home phone systems are becoming more sophisticated, and one day you might want a multiline system with hold or who knows what. be sure to run a line to your entertainment center, some pay per view systems may require it someday, or you might need a computer as part of the system, such as download music.

Make sure the drop from the telephone pole (or underground) brings in at least four lines: fax machine, computer, kids line, etc. It will be a lot easier to include future options now rather than after the fact.

Shayne,

Please, take it from someone that has been there...

Run Cat 5 to every phone jack in the house! We had the standard two-line ran when our house was built - didn't know any better at the time.

Then, when we got the second line, the cheap stuff the builder used was soooo cheap that you could literally hear the conversation on the other line. There was sooo much bleed.

Anway, I ended up working out of the hous and got a third line. No place to run it. I had to run new wire to every phone jack in a finished house, including a finished basement with a drywall ceiling.

Not fun at all. I am darn good with a fish tape though!

I'm a big believer in more is better when it comes to cable runs. Even though most people are doing wireless home networks now, I feel you should run two pulls of cat5. It doesn't take much more effort to pull two than one. I use one for telephone / intercom and one for data.

If you have multiple floors. Make sure you have a conduit from the top (attic) to the bottom (basement or crawl space). That way if you want to add more, you can come up from the bottom and down from the top.

As long as you are running one cat 5 to each room you may as well make it two. You may want a LAN someday. Since you have to make the holes in the studs anyway it's just as easy to run the two wires. You can always terminate the second cable later, and if you never use it you are out $30.00 max.

I would agree that while you are there you should definitely run 2 pulls of CAT 5 to every room. Pretty soon everyone is going to have whole house home networks and you will be glad that you did it now. If only firewire cable wasn't so expensive it would be a good idea to run some of that also.

I would second running 2 cat 5e cables to each phone location, along with 2 RG6 and a cat 5e to each TV location. 2 RG6 to the attic from where all of your equipment will be, and leave them long enough to run anywhere in the attic(for a dish,FM antena, or OTA) The 2 RG6's to each TV will give you the ability to use modulators and whole house video later, the cat5e to the TV's will give you the ability of a phone line for a dish or maybe pay per view later on. Also as others mentioned run a conduit to the attic, probally a 1"-1 1/2" pvc for anyhing you might have missed. I just built my house and thought I would never use all them wires, I put in a whole house networking system, and used most of them on that. I am curently looking at putting in modulators for the CATV, the extra RG6 will come in handy. I would pull all of the wires to a central location(ie-basment) where if you were to finish the basment the wires will be in the unfinished area. If you want to see some pictures of what it all looks like(the networking area) let me know.

You might also put some extra LAN jacks in places where you can later add wireless access points, so then you can compute wherever; porch, kitchen, backyard.

RG6 also gives you the ability to add satellite, which I would highly recommend. Also one run of RG6 to an outside location so you can add an antenna to receive OTA HDTV.

Hasnt anyone here heard of PNA??? It allows networking through a phoneline...

2 runs of cat5 is OVERKILL in my opinion...

I respectfully disagree. PNA gives you up to 10MB/S, and some fax machines can interfere with it. Compare this to gigabit speeds that are possible with cat 5e. Because he is already going to be pulling one run to cat 5e to each location it will cost him very little to add a second. He doesn't need to terminate them until he needs them. He can use them not only for data, but Leviton makes S-Video jacks that terminate using cat 5, and Crestron recently showed and entire video dist. system at CES that used cat 5. It may be out of reach for most people now, but it will be something he may want to do in 3-4 years. It is much easier to put it on now before the sheetrock, and down the road he will consider it $30-40 dollars well spent.

Just thought I would add my two cents. Coming from someone who has just spent a large block of time, over 20hours, installing Cat5 throughout his home I will tell you to definitly do two runs of Cat5 from the outset. It will make a great many options on home automation, telephone service, and home networking possible.

Also, on the comment about PNA, I have some experience with it and it does work okay. We had a number of issues with some DSL connections (voice over) and noise. The only reason we went with it was due to the overwhelming cost of routing new cable throughout the building that we were in.

Like I said just my two cents.

Why make it ugly just because you can?

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Thanks for the replies. I am currently reading the book 'Smart Homes for Dummies.' I had not considered two cat 5 lines, but I will include the 2nd in my plans.

I phrased my question poorly, however. What I wanted to know was, how easy/difficult is it to connect additional phone lines to the demarc box? Is it simple plug & pray from the box to the various rooms, or do I have to split and connect wires?

Overall, I plan on running my network and cable lines to a central location. In my case, a closest, since basements are a rarity here, and an attic or basement would be too hot and humid.

Also, would you recommend I replace the standard demarc box with my own?

What I did was(this dosn't make it right) was run one cat5 from my point of attachment outside to a 66 block. Now if I add anymore phone lines I have 3 spares outside, and with the 66 block I can easily move things around(plus the 66 block is cheap, 9 bucks at home depot) When it came time to terminate I used a 3 port plate, one for data, one for phone, and one spare for maybe a fax line, or who knows what.

For connecting to the phone companes d-mark, if it is what they have here in Michigan it is easy, just unplug the phone jack in the box(so you dont get a little jolt, I got one before and it wasn't nice) and add your wires. They tried to charge me 60 bucks for them to do it, I said no thanks.

I also recommend two runs of Cat5e at a minimum. I would add additional lines into any office area.

I have run about 1800' of Cat5e with 22 ports in the house, all for data connections,printer sharing and internet access.

You can see a pic of our network setup in the rear of my theater gear area.