Quote:
Originally Posted by Maker
Blue circle = CATV splitter (correctly identified by others). Unlikely you have 8 or 10 cable boxes. So that was put in to make every wall coax jack alive. So the CATV box can plug in anywhere. Technically, that is a bad thing to do because of signal loss, and all the unused wall jacks are likely not terminated. If you use cable TV, I would connect only the wall jacks that are used, to a splitter with no extra ports. That could also connect a cable tv based internet modem. Those boxes highly dislike being after a splitter with unterminated lines. That often causes mysterious drop outs and data speed issues.
So - if no CATV at all, that can be removed. If you have CATV boxes for tv, change splitter to just enough ports as the number of boxes. (and that should have been done properly by the cable company)
This is likely XFinity because there is an orange CATV wire along the left side coming downward. I think it enters the box out of view at the bottom, and loops at the top. Spectrum used orange coax.
Red circle = Fibre signal. The white wire from the bottom is the incoming data line. That kink in the wire at the bottom of the pic is not good; straighten it please. The blue wire connected to it goes to a wall jack somewhere in the house. The connector the white wire plugs into is junk. It will be ok for speeds up to maybe 100mbps. But for 300, or higher it will introduce garbage onto the data. The twists of each pair of wires need to be maintained all the way to the connector, and the blue insulation should not be removed that much. Very sloppy.
The green thing at the top is from the old days of wired telephones. You cannot get a wired phone line nowadays, so the entire green thing can come out. Carefully pull off the wires from it and tie them out of the way for the future.
The good thing is that the wall jacks were wired with these blue internet wires. Should have been rated as cat6 (or cat5e at the minimum) for 1G speed. If it is cat5, max speed is 100mbps (lousy); not designed to handle faster speeds.
Look at the writing on the blue wires. If you have cat5 wires, and are paying for much higher speed than 100mbps, you have some thinking to do. You will have odd dropouts. Stuttering. Speed degradation. Packet corruption (data loss). Watching IPTV could stutter. I would do one of these things.
A) Put the router in the garage and connect the white fibre line to it (with a coupler and cat6 cable as an extension). Every device will have to connect via wireless; but is totally immune from power surges.
B) Get a pair of MoCA adapters and run the ethernet through one of the coax lines into the house somewhere. (not thru the splitter)
C) Just buy slow (100mbps max) internet and save $$ but live with the lack of speed.
One thing to consider is adding a small UPS for the router. That will also act as a good surge protector. There are surge protectors for the ethernet line available. You want to block as much energy as possible, before it reaches your computers. The best thing would have been having the fiber come into the panel, and then the modem would be inside the panel. No surge is possible through fibre lines. As is now, hard to guess what things are like outside.
The hunter remote control shouldn't be connected anymore (except maybe a ground wire) and can be removed. You can probably sell it.
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From my experience working in homes south of 466A here in the Villages, I've not seen any ethernet wires less than Cat 5E. They are installing Cat 6 in the new areas in the South. That said, in testing the Cat 5E ethernet cabling in my home which is a 2600sqft Ivy, no run is longer than 50 - 75 feet, significantly less than the 100 meter spec and I am able to get the rated 2.5Gbs and even up to 5GBs with these short runs using an internal test server no problem without any dropouts. True, if you have longer cable lenghts there will be a point where the Cat 5E will not support those speeds. To be honest, I was very surprised. Given this information and since not many have internet speeds greater than 1Gbs from their ISP, I wouldn't go through the trouble of running new Cat 6 wire unless you have some very specific needs. I also have a NAS (network attached storage) and the existing Cat 5E cabling works no problem with the 2.5 Gbs ports.
The data cabinet in the OPs picture is showing an Old Quantum or CentryLink installation where the ONT/Router were installed in a box outside of the house and then ethernet cable was brought into the data cabinet and patched to the existing home ethernet cabling. They don't do that anymore. Now the fiber is brought into the data cabinet where they install something called a SmartNid with is an ONT/Router with a 2 port switch. I have one of the newer ones with 2, 10Gbs ports. From there you can connect your own Wi-Fi equipment or Quantums. Very simple.