[SOLVED] Help change land line to ethernet

[Aussi66]

First of all im 14 and have no clue what i am doing. I need to figure out what cable leads to the port in my room. In my Basement i have a box with a bunch of cables leading into stuff and beside it there is 4 ethernet ports(two are occupied). Not sure what to do

 

[Alabalcho]

Ask your parents' permission for whatever you do.
Post pictures of that panel in the basement, and in your room.
Describe how you get Internet access, and what devices are involved.

And finally (actually, first of all) - what are you going to do with these cables?

 

[Aussi66]

I'm 14 and my dad wants to make sure what i'm doing is correct. I want to change the landline in my room to Ethernet. The panel with all the cables is in the basement but i don't know which one leads to my room. There is also 4 Ethernet ports (pics attached) and i don't know if i have to plug into those or do i plug it into my modem. Also what are all the things i need.

https://imgur.com/a/5trrxVd

View: https://imgur.com/a/5trrxVd

 

[hang-the-9]

I'm 14 and my dad wants to make sure what i'm doing is correct. I want to change the landline in my room to Ethernet. The panel with all the cables is in the basement but i don't know which one leads to my room. There is also 4 Ethernet ports (pics attached) and i don't know if i have to plug into those or do i plug it into my modem. Also what are all the things i need.

https://imgur.com/a/5trrxVd

View: https://imgur.com/a/5trrxVd

First you need to find out what wire goes where, if the jacks and cables are not labeled, you would need to use a tone tester to connect to the jack and then to the wires and check them one by one till you get a signal, similar to this

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gTA5kuL8YA


Next issue, once you find out which jack it is, from the looks of the wiring, it uses network cables but they are split for phone use, which means the jack in your room may not have all the wires there for network. That means a new cable run needs to be done from the central area to your room and wired to one of the jacks on the right of the picture Or if you see all 8 wires in your jack with a single cable, you need to re-wire them to the jacks with the ports, same as last step. Then that jack would go into the router or switch for a connection.

 

[punkncat]

Wow, yeah that picture makes my head hurt a bit....

sorry have to edit, one moment

Ok, so the left side of block right side wires appears to be phone pass through. The far left cable should run outside to your phone block. the remaining four cables will be (generally speaking) the phone jacks throughout your house.
The right side of that block indicates that you have two internet ports wired up in the house.

Generally speaking a phone jack will be on RJ11 and have a small square plug for a phone. Internet port will be RJ45 and is bigger, rectagular.
In theory you could remove the plate from the wall in your bedroom if you don't straight away see an RJ45 type plug there. You would be checking to see if all 4 pair (8 wires) exist in that box. Each pair of those wires can be utilized for a phone line, and they easily could have tapped into this cable in another room to put jacks there off any number of those pair before or after your room.

With that said...as suggested above you would use a tone generator to find out which of those cables running down to your structured cabling is the one to your bedroom. If it wasn't spliced then you can convert it over to one of the internet ports simply by punching it down to the appropriate port, changing the plate/jack in your room, and a couple of CAT 5 cables. Keep in mind that if the phone service is active the tone generator may not work on the primary pair. In theory you can walk out to your phone block and use the test jack feature to unplug the incoming lines there to allow tone to work. Since phones work in parallel you will likely get tone on all the wires connected on that block unless you take the time to pull each off the connectors....in that case you would need a punch down tool to reconnect them since this isn't an 86 block and there are no bridging clips.

In truth, a professional in this field could make short work of determining what is and isn't possible with a quick look in person.

 

[punkncat]

Something else of note. It is fairly common for the people doing the pre wire of this type cabling to do a "trap sheet" or labelling of the wires so they know what goes where. You may look to see if the wires have a small number label sticker on them and see if there is a bit of paper stuck, or a key written in the structured cable box. In some cases we would just write the location on the jacket in sharpie.
I see no evidence of that in this limited view, but doesn't mean it's not there.

 

[jsmithepa]

First of all im 14 and have no clue what i am doing.

Well that is not an auspicious beginning to a post. You may as well end up having a professional come in do this for you.

Punkncat gave u some good info.

If you still feel lucky I suggest label everything, find out what goes where whenever possible and take plenty of pictures, so when you Dad asks, what happened to the phones? or why the alarm is going off? or did you break the furnace? u can go back and, at least, attempt to undo.