IAC - Network Distribution Panel Question

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mahalingam

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My son is moving into Woodbury Square. One of the amenities is the apartment is pre-wired with coax, cat5e, and POTS in every room; there is a nice little distribution panel in the bedroom closet. However, while the cat5e wiring is there in the box, there is no Ethernet patch panel in it - only a bridging circuit for the phone wires and a 2-way splitter for the RG-6. There are empty "slots" on the backplane where an Ethernet patch panel would fit if I could find the proper one. The cable modem could easily sit in this closet and connect network and phone to every room in the apartment.

Of course the Cox installer refused to do anything with it. He connected one coax jack in the living room and hooked up both the Contour box and the cable modem to it.  ::)

Unfortunately the company that made the distribution box appears to be defunct, so my chances of purchasing the "correct" patch panel seem pretty slim. So my questions to you (former) IAC renters are these: how do you have your network set up? What patch panels and/or other equipment did you buy?
 
mahalingam said:
My son is moving into Woodbury Square. One of the amenities is the apartment is pre-wired with coax, cat5e, and POTS in every room; there is a nice little distribution panel in the bedroom closet. However, while the cat5e wiring is there in the box, there is no Ethernet patch panel in it - only a bridging circuit for the phone wires and a 2-way splitter for the RG-6. There are empty "slots" on the backplane where an Ethernet patch panel would fit if I could find the proper one. The cable modem could easily sit in this closet and connect network and phone to every room in the apartment.

Of course the Cox installer refused to do anything with it. He connected one coax jack in the living room and hooked up both the Contour box and the cable modem to it.  ::)

Unfortunately the company that made the distribution box appears to be defunct, so my chances of purchasing the "correct" patch panel seem pretty slim. So my questions to you (former) IAC renters are these: how do you have your network set up? What patch panels and/or other equipment did you buy?
Click to expand...

Picture? Wiring up cat5e and adding connectors is very straight forward. I used Leviton QuickPort connectors and bought a cheap LAN cable tester when I did my own wiring.

Cox "professional" installation is about the worst. My guy refused to do much but at least he left me a spool of RG-6.
 
Here's what the distribution panel looks like:

m0Tw9hz.jpg


The green circuit board at the bottom right is the POTS telephone bridge. You can run a modular phone cord from the Cox Digital Telephone cable modem into one of the RJ-14 jacks and have telephone service at every phone jack throughout the apartment.

Directly above the phone PCB are empty spaces where you can install a similar circuit board to distribute the Ethernet signals. The grey wires coming down form the left, as well as the single grey wire dangling down from the right center, are cat5e Ethernet cables which are currently unterminated. For whatever reason (probably cost), the Irvine Company didn't install the Ethernet distribution PCB into the panel; if they had, it would have been a simple matter of running some Ethernet patch cables between the patch panel and the RJ-45 jacks in the cable modem+router that Cox provides.

UJsUJmS.jpg


It's a pretty typical structured wiring enclosure, but the company that made it appears to be defunct (there is no longer a web site at the URL printed on the inside of the panel door), so finding the missing parts is going to be a challenge. Yes, I can cerainly jury-rig something that works from a standard RJ-45 punchdown patch panel, but I was hoping for a more elegant solution, e.g. a source for the original Ethernet patch panel PCB, or a pointer to an equivalent one that sits neatly into the panel. With the thousands of tenants that have lived in these apartments over the last 10 years I figure someone has come up with a good solution.  8)

 
nosuchreality said:
If the amenities include prewired cat5, make the complex fix it.
Click to expand...

Easier said than done. The subcontractor that did the original wiring is probably long gone, and the current staff is undoubtedly as clueless as the Cox installer WRT the network wiring. And even if they were willing to do the work, I don't trust them to do as good a job as I can. ;)

peppy said:
Without an ethernet switch or router in there, it doesn't seem to be that useful.
Click to expand...

The idea is to put the cable modem right next to the panel and run 1 coax, 1 POTS telephone, and 4 Ethernet cables between the cable modem and the appropriate connections inside the box. That would make the pre-wired infrastructure fully functional.

Last weekend I bought an 8 port patch panel and started punching it down to the cat5e inside the box. When I went to test my first port, however, I found it was completely dead. It turns out that the wiring contractor installed 2 runs of cat5e to every wall box and installed 2 RJ-45 jacks. However, instead of doing the logical thing (wiring one RJ-45 for 1 or 2 lines of POTS telephone and the other for Ethernet) they wired both RJ-45s for POTS (2 pairs to each jack, for a total of 4 POTS phone lines). Whiskey... Tango... Foxtrot... Over? What apartment dweller is going to need four POTS phone lines?!?!?!?  ::)

So now I have to bring some RJ-45 keystone jacks with me when I go back to finish the job. The really amazing part is that my son is the first tenant in this apartment who will actually make use of the wiring.  ;D


 
Hi,

Did you ever figure it out? I am living at The Park, and I have a similar conundrum where the built in cat5e wiring is not complete. The picture you posted looks exactly like mine.
 
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