Sharing Ethernet and Phone on the same CAT5 Cable

When we built our house 4 years ago, the builder installed a central wiring panel. Every room has a Cat5 jack in it that terminates back to a 110 block in this panel. However, they only ran 1 cable to each room, and it's only delivering standard phone. At the time, I didn't see a real need to pay a whole lot of extra money for a separate cable to support ethernet, when I could just setup a wireless router.

Then I got a job working from home, which included a VoIP phone. My office is upstairs and all my network gear is downstairs. So I initially installed DD-WRT on an extra Linksys Wireless Router and turned it into an Ethernet to Wireless Bridge and connected my VoIP phone to that. However, I started to experience issues with QoS using this setup that I never could really seem to resolve. So, I started looking at ways to get this phone on a wired connection. Obviously, I could move my DSL Modem and Router upstairs into the office, but I have other equipment downstairs that's connected to it. So what to do?

Well, knowing a few things about Ethernet and phones, it dawned on me that I could actually mix phone and Ethernet on a sinlge Cat5 cable. Standard Ethernet only uses 2 pairs out of the 4 available. That leaves 2 "extra" pairs. So, here's how I've re-wired everything to allow for a single Ethernet and 2 phone lines in every room now.

On a standard RJ45 connector, Ethernet only uses pins 1,2,4, and 5. I bought a small patch block from Fry's electronics and terminated each fo the cables from each room on the block. Then on the other side of the block I made a custom cable that only connected to pins 1,2,4,5 on the block, and an RJ45 on the other end that I plugged into a small Linksys switch, which fit nicely into the panel. Luckily the panel included an outlet for power to the switch. The remaining pins (3,6,7,and 8) I patched to the 110 block where my phone service comes in.

In order for this to work though, each jack in the house must also be rewired. Plugging an ethernet cable into the jack and connecting it to the PC could be dangerous to the PC. You've now got phone signal coming into the ethernet jack, and sending a 90 volt ringing signal into your PC is probably not a good thing. All I had to do was to split the pairs out again on the jack into 2 jacks - one for phone and one for ethernet.

I've now got 1 Ethernet and 1 Phone jack in each room, and it seems to be working really well. I was actually a bit concerned that I might get some interference from the ethernet signals and the DSL coming on on my phone line, but it all seems to be working really well.

Windows Home Server + Tuner Card + SageTV

First off, I've been playing with Windows Home Server lately, and I have to say I like it. It's based on Windows Server 2003, and gives you some pretty nice functionality packaged in a friendly interface. First off was taking my two 250GB drives and turning them into a single 500GB logical drive for storage. Second is setting up some default shares: Music, Pictures, Video, Public. And finally the backup solution is pretty slick. So now I have all of the PC's in my house backing up and all of my music and videos centralized. If I run out of space on the 500GB logical drive, I can just plop another drive in and 'add' it to my storage capacity.

However, this box used to serve as a media center PC, and has a Hauppauge HVR1600 tuner card in it. I hated to lose that functionality. So, I decided to install the drivers and see what I could do. I was hoping to be able to use this to schedule some recordings that I could watch from the other PCs in the house.

I've never been impressed with Hauppauge's WinTV interface, so I started looking for something better. What I came across was a really slick package: SageTV. SageTV offers a version that's compatible with Windows Home Server and turns the home server into a streaming server.
Install the SageTV client on your laptop and you can stream live or recorded TV from the Windows Home Server to your laptop.
I'm still running the trial of SageTV, so we'll see how it goes. Not sure I'm ready to fork out the $75 for the registered version just yet. But so far I'm liking this setup.

Next step.....Install Apache/PHP/Wordpress and setup a custom PhotoBlog for my wife's photography work.