[Shop-talk] More internet questions

[Brian Kemp]

I have a 1957 house that had phone jacks all over the place in my 
current house.  Initially the phone company connected the line, but I 
was only getting about 1 MB/s, so we disconnected all jacks except my 
office area and the master bedroom at the rats nest under the house.  
The office has the modem and the bedroom has the cordless phone base 
unit.  The signal went up to 2.5 MB/s, which is the best I can get in my 
area unless I go with the cable company.

We were doing some renovations and I had to move my desktop computer, so 
needed to activate one of the disconnected phone jacks.  I moved the 
phone base unit temporarily to that jack I wanted to activate and 
clipped all the disconnected green wires together then put the phone on 
speaker.  I then touched the red wires to the connection block one at a 
time until I heard dial tone on the phone.  I then connected that one 
additional wire pair at the junction and the signal stayed good.

Two years later, my wife setup her laptop work area about as far away 
from the wifi router as she could get then complained that the signal 
was bad.  I ran a 100' premade Cat 5e cable from the DSL router through 
a closet into the crawlspace and down to the end of the house.  I then 
made a hole in the air duct and ran the network cable out the floor 
register behind her desk and added a new router.  Now she has good 
signal and I have good signal.

I made the decision not to have that second router under control of the 
DSL router.  That means my computer can't see the wife and kids 
computers and their computers can't see mine.  I consider that to be a 
good thing.

What I'm getting at is maybe you have an easy way to activate a 
different phone jack for the DSL router and move it where you want it.  
You may also have an easy way to run a network cable from the modem to 
your desktop, perhaps through a closet up to the attic or down to the 
basement.

You can use a site like speedtest.net to check your signal before adding 
new wire and after to see if you have any degradation.

Good luck,

Brian


On 4/17/2017 12:11 PM, Dave Cavanaugh wrote:
> We're moving into an old, 850 square foot house on the Utah property 
> where we'll be building our new home.  The house was originally built 
> in the 1880s and has been remodeled, or at least modified, a number of 
> times.  The phone wiring looks like it was installed by drunken 
> chimpanzees.