Yes, you are correct. Since you aren't using CenturyLink anymore, the cat5 cable in the room where your router is located is not being used anymore. You need to find out where the cat5 cables (from each room) terminate. That will typically be a low-voltage panel in the garage but it sounds like it is elsewhere in your home. If you can find where they terminate then you should be able to splice the cat5 cables from the two rooms together. The trick is figuring out which cat5s to splice together. You need to match up the 8 color coded wires (4 pairs). There are compression connectors (insert two wires and crush the connector down) that are handy for this. It sounds like you still have an RJ-11 connector in one room. Replace that with an RJ-45 - 4 pairs, use the "A" connection stencil. At this point you should be able to run a cat5 cable from your router to the RJ-45 connector in the one room and a cat5 cable from the RJ-45 in the other room to your computer.
However, the best solution was from tsmith167 in post #9. Buy a mesh router. It should provide more uniform WiFi performance than a range extender and you also wind up with a single namespace for WiFi.
Quote:
Originally Posted by scout2028
My house was built at the end of 2009 and has standard telephone jacks in every room. We gave up land lines years ago so the phone wires in the house are not being used.
My wife's computer has had difficulty with decent WIFI speeds. We have a Lantana with a Linksys EA7500 in the front guest bedroom and her computer is located in the laundry room separated by 2 exterior walls and 2 interior walls. I've placed a range extender in the dining room but it helps only a little and not even that all the time.
Recently I ran a 25 ft. ethernet cable from the single port on the range extender through the dining room through the kitchen up the wall over the door and then down to her ethernet port. Now getting ~100 Mbps on her system. And that's WiFi to the range extender and ethernet cable to the computer. That's great but the ethernet cable running through everything is not a long term solution.
Based on a previous thread
Looking to replace phone jacks with ethernet connections
I suspect that the cabling already exists for me to have a direct ethernet connection from my router (it has a open port), directly to her system. Adjacent to her computer is a telephone jack and adjacent to the router there is what used to be a telephone jack that CenturyLink converted to 2 RJ45 jacks when we had their service. (Went back to Comcast after CenturyLink for 2+ years.)
The previous thread noted above referred to a low-voltage panel but I do not have one in the garage but I do have a 'Network Service' box on the outside of the house. (Can't get to it now because of overgrown shrubs but have someone coming to trim later this week - at least he said he was.) I think this box was used for standard telephone wiring.
Is that the low-voltage panel?
Is it as simple as rewiring the laundry room receptacle from telephone to RJ45 and plugging an ethernet cable from router to wall and then another from laundry room wall to wife's computer?
Do I need to do anything inside the exterior box?
Thanks, |