I have run in cat5E cable from our stair cupboard to various rooms in the house. I use these for a network and for our analogue telephone line extensions.
The terminations are a bit of botch at the moment and I intend to fit a small patch panel and terminate all cat5E cables in the panel. The remote end of each cat 5 cable will be terminated in a RJ45 outlet.
Searching the web I'm struggling to find and easy way to patch our BT phone lines to the panel. I have found RJ45 plugs to BT sockets which would allow me to plug a phone into a RJ45 outlet. But at the panel end I want the opposite a BT plug to RJ45 socket to fit in the BT socket so I can then patch to the panel. Do these things exist or is there and easier way to achieve what I want.
Secondly to connect my broadband router to the patch panel I'd like a RJ11 to RJ45 patch lead. At the moment I'm doing this with a two leads and a RJ11 to BT coupler connected to a BT to RJ45 coupler.
I hope if standard parts are available I won't have problems with connecting the correct pairs.
I made them using an RJ45 plug, and a BT phone plug on a patch cable. Actually, I managed to get two patch cables into the RJ45, thus giving me up to two phone circuits over each cat 5 4-pair.
There appears to be no standard for mapping the phone connections to RJ45 pins. I found 3 different manufacturer's adapters, and they all used different mappings.
Not sure why you want to route the broadband across the house. I suggest putting your master socket, broadband router and hub all in the stair cupboard.
For my existing setup I bought a couple of BT extensions cut one end off and connected it to the cat 5 via a terminal block. I will try crimping a RJ45 plug onto the extension to make my own patch lead.
My mistake about the broadband router, it is in the cupboard and is connected to the BT ASDL socket with the two leads and couplers I mentioned and isn't very tidy. The RJ45-RJ11 patch lead is to make this connection with a single short lead.
Thanks for this. I've just tided up my connection by doing this. It probably explains why I couldn't find a RJ11 to RJ45 patch lead. A good day when you learn something (wish I'd known this a couple of years ago).
I have done the same sort of thing in our house. I ran cat5e all over the place and while I was at it connected a run directly to the master phone socket (it punches down just like phone wire). I now have a port on the patch panel that acts as the master phone socket. That plugs into a hub/splitter and I then simply patch in any of the Ethernet ports I want to use as phone sockets. I admit I built the phone "hub" myself but it was really easy just soldering a bunch of cables together and sticking them in a box. Coloured socket covers are a very useful way of stopping you from accidentally plugging computer equipment into phone lines etc.
Been there, done that. My magic formula goes like this: use the LAUs you've found - RJ45 plug one end, BT socket on the other - at the 'office' locations. LAU, meaning I think Line Adaptor Unit, is what the structured-wiring wallahs sell for this job; you want the 'totally plain', passive, flavour, not the 'master' or 'secondary'.
At the phone incoming location, I made up a compatibly-wired BT-plug-to-RJ45 socket, by butchering a couple of BT-to-BT leads and a couple of RJ45 patch cables; joint made using small terminal block inside an adaptable box (3 incoming lines here - 2 over HomeHighway, one 'ordinary' taken post-filter ADSL (so I have only one filter, in the master socket, and take all the extension lines including the one going to the patch panel on the filtered side - saves all that fannying about with microfilters; I also feed the ADSL side, which my master socket offers on an RJ11, into another of the structured-wiring ways. (As Bob Eager pointed out, RJ11s go into the middle 4 of an RJ45 by deliberate design.)
'Compatible' above just means that the combination of the LAU wiring (for which there's no accepted standard, so buy several of the same make in one go!) and the homebrew cable, when joined 'straight-through' over any number of RJ45 patchleads, acts like a simple BT plug-to-socket extension cord. A coupla minutes with a multimeter sorts out the necessary wiremap.
OK, that's the phone-input side and office-output side. At the patch panel, I use 3-way RJ45 all-female couplers to feed the phone signal to as many 'output' drops as makes sense: 3-way because each one other than the first and last has two 'bus' connections and one 'drop', if you see what I mean. If your patch panels aren't too dense, you can instead use a one-male two-female RJ45 adaptor and plug that straight in to the patch panel.
Sorry, but I think you'll have to accept one bit of homebuild wiring for the BT-plug-meets-RJ45-plug bit, because (a) LAUs vary, and (b) in 'real office' installs, they punch phonelines directly into fancy-pantsy structured wiring feedpoints which cater for many (12? 16?) incoming lines at a time. If you don't have crimp tools for both RJ45 and BT sockets, as most of us don't, chopping into presupplied cables is the way to go; be warned that UK phone-style cables are often wired in weirdo (litz?) wire - hard-to-connect-to copper strands interwoven with a fibre substrate of some sort, which you won't be able to solder to - fold it back on itself once or twice before using a suitable pressure connection.
I found a neat little short cable with BT plug on one end and small IDC box on the other; ideal for the job.
Used for flexibility, but it isn't Litz wire. Litz is individually insulated strands that move from the surface to the middle of the weave and back again, to lessen 'skin' effects at RF. Not that the name matters...as you say, the phone wires are a pig.
What I did seems pretty neat and works nicely. Designate 4 or so ports on a patch panel for each incoming phone line. Run a CAT5 from each master socket's extension connections to the patch panel, daisy chaining through the 4 ports. You can then make any patch up to 4 sockets onto any one line.
To keep things simple at the other end, I used plain BT face plates where only a phone was ever likely to be connected, but still ran two lots of CAT5 to it, such that it could be swapped for a double RJ45 plate if desired.
Bad move, this knackers the RJ45 socket (the plastic bits either side of the RJ11 terminals bend the outer RJ45 contact wires). Or at least it did when I tried it.
At the phone end, I used secondary RJ45->BT socket leads like you have found. At the phone line end, I used the same, with a male to male phone plug lead obtained from
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For the patching, I had a patch panel larger than required for all the connections. Then I chose 8 patch sockets (all the highest numbers) and using some stripboard and some cable ensured that the pins were all commoned together. This allowed short 50cm patch leads to patch a particular RJ45 socket into the phone system, including the one that led to the incoming phone line. By not hardwiring this, it allowed any socket to configured as a phone socket (by patching to the commoned area) or a computer socket (by patching to the hub).
Tinsel is what Stefek was referring to - 'tinsel conductors' being the phrase used in specifications for this sort of wire. It can usually be soldered with a little patience, but the joints never look very pretty. Heatshrink sleeving can cover a multitude of sins though...
Convention is to use pins 4 and 5 (the blue twisted pair), since this is unused in Ethernet*. I believe the original intention was to allow network and phone service to office desks with one patch cable.
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