keep old phone network in my house or rip and replace with cat 6?

[intermediatic]

Why hello everyone, I'm building a structured wiring system. Yay!
 
I've already connected first pulls of coax and cat 6 and am wishing I had done it a year or two ago.
 
Now on to my question … Some background … We bought the house we are living in two years ago. It was built in the early 1980s and there are phone jacks everywhere. There is no room in the house (including bathrooms) without one. I have this vision of an alternate reality 2013 where I'd be walking around the house with my little Princess (phone), plugging it in everywhere I went, even outside while grilling, even on the potty.

Since I bought the house, I have been mercilessly attacking the phone system here. An eye-level jack (ok for a 10 year old) on my façade (I guess for a wall mounted exterior phone???!!!), clip those wires and push 'em into the abyss of whatever lies inside this building's walls. I've done this over and over. For gods sakes', we live in the age of wireless, right?
 
I've lived in a house in which the phone system is laid out beautifully even thought the house was nearly 100 years old. In the current house the little box the phones are connected too looks like monkey-birds inhabit it, a tangle of colorful wire. It offends me.
 
There are, however, a few key jacks that I've preserved, e.g. the one in my office (to which I connect my printer/fax when I need to use it) and the one in the living room to which our wireless, telephone is connected. FYI, we have FiOS and that is what runs than phone.
 
This week I've started down the road of a structured wiring system. Bought a Leviton cabinet, bought 1000' of Cat 6, etc.
 
For a convoluted set of reasons, the jack for the living room phone is now sitting inside of a 1 gang space that will soon be occupied by a Decora insert for keystone jacks.
 
What should I do? Should I keep things as they are or replace with Cat 6?
 
Clearly the current phone system bothers me. But is there any reason to keep it? For what it's worth, I think it's Cat 2 since there are twisted pair wires in funny colors like white-brown and so on, but Cat-2 is not very useful, is it?

 

[tmbrown97]

I would venture to guess it's Cat3 or some variation.  Some pics might be fun to see.
 
I'm not a fan of taking any existing wire and killing it off completely - you'd be amazed at the ways you can repurpose wiring - and it depends on the space - do you have the ability to redo those runs as Cat5?  If so, DO IT!  you can always go backwards and run phone lines over it.
 
Cat5/6 is amazingly useful - there are baluns/adapters to run damn near anything over it - so if you can get a couple wires in each place, do it... but if not, I wouldn't bury them forever - who knows, maybe you could run VDSL to get internet somewhere (although wireless would be faster) or use them for security contacts or who knows what else...

 

[intermediatic]

Alright, you wanted to see it. Don't say I didn't warn you. Think I should submit it to Pictures of Ugly Work at Sundance Communications?
http://sundance-communications.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/457886
 

 
lest you think the rest of the wiring is equally vile.
 
our breaker box and transfer switch.
 

 
Finally, the mess at the plug. Yes, my set up is hardly better but that's because I didn't have enough keystones and I was keeping the blue Cat 6 cables where they wouldn't fall back through. In an hour or two I'll get to putting those where they belong and it will all be nice and neat back there. Minus the telephone horror that is.

 

[intermediatic]

Darn, somehow the last photo didn't post. No edit button? Here it is.
 

 

[wuench]

I would replace or abandon.  Your new solution should be able to support not just phone but ethernet and more.  That rat's nest you have now will only support phone, or maybe serial or contact closure, but probably not even that the way it is wired.  I am not only wireless, I just installed an Obi110 the other day so now I am VOIP with zero phone bill as well using Google Voice (well $12 a year for E911).
 
And if you do convert your phone to your new cabling, you have the luxury of knowing it is done right and when the phone or DSL goes out and the phone company insists that the issue is your internal wiring you can be confident it isn't.  That has happened to me twice, and I told them there is no reason I need to be home to meet the phone guy because the issue is absolutely outside the house.

 

[intermediatic]

whoa. i didn't know about the obi system. that's very interesting. both my wife and i already use google voice.
 
i'm just wondering if it wouldn't be easier to run a new wire to the alarm system than to puzzle out that rat's nest. i can always reuse the wires if i abandon them in place.

 

[tmbrown97]

Honestly, I've seen MUCH worse than that - all the wires appear to come into one central place, and while the termination is sloppy, it'd be very easy to clean up and there's room in the can to do it.  That said, yea if you have any way of replacing that, I'd do that - but if not I wouldn't totally kill them off.
 
The Obi is cool with the GV integration; I haven't tried it yet because I already have enough other voice services here - like the Ooma (which I can't say enough good things about - all the quality and features of Vonage without the price tag that Vonage turns around and DUMPS into advertising); I have a SIP provider that my IP phones hook directly to, and I have 3CX still running in the background somewhere and on the shelf I have a PlugPBX. There's definitely a lot of better options for voice than POTS these days.  I even have my fax machine on a SIP ATA and it works just fine - I think I just forced the baud rate down a little.

 

[Del91574]

Clean it up.
 
Voice is fine on Cat 3.....if you really want to you can run a fresh piece of category cable to the existing outlet for the future, but as of right now, I'd say spending and running for ethernet at the existing outlet is overkill unless you're going to IP based telephony at the outlet.
 
As far as DSL goes, it's better to have a dedicated home run for the modem, then run the IP network and run a whole house filter for the voice...the argument of where the signal disappears on a troubleshooting trip by the telco is a moot point if the modem is split off and dedicated.

 

[tmbrown97]

But since he's using FIOS it's rather moot, at least for his purposes 

 

[intermediatic]

Yes, I'm using FiOS, moreover the only cost is going to be using up cable from the 1000' cable box and keystones from the giant bag of keystones. Well that and my time. Then again, it may take more time to figure out how to re-wire the jack into RJ 11.
 
I've ordered an Obihai 110 from Amazon. I'm a little confused by which one to get. I suspect we will want a 110 for my wife and a 100 for me. We have FiOS Triple Play and the phone service is free or maybe even cuts our price as I recall. Plus we would like to have a family line. So the 110 can handle those two lines while the 100 can handle my Google Voice. Maybe we can get rid of the FiOS one day, but for now might as well keep it.

 

[wuench]

The Obihai 110 only support two profiles.  If you use E911 that will take up one.  The obihai 200/202 support 4 services, so could cover you, your wife, E911, and one more.  If you are keeping the home phone/FIOS you can probably just use that for 911, and get away with the 110 only.  I abandoned my home line, so I am not familiar how that all works, but the 110+ have ports for a analog line as well.  The 100 does not.

 

[tmbrown97]

Yes, I'm using FiOS, moreover the only cost is going to be using up cable from the 1000' cable box and keystones from the giant bag of keystones. Well that and my time. Then again, it may take more time to figure out how to re-wire the jack into RJ 11.

You don't need to wire anything different for RJ11 - it's a loose fit, but it fits in the jack just fine; at the other end where all the Cat5 terminates, if you have it going to a patch panel, then just run an RJ11 phone cord from that jack to a telephone splitter - simple and clean.  I've done this on a large scale with hundreds of extensions - then when the day came to upgrade to VOIP, all I had to do was yank the telephone patch cables and splitter and replace with Cat5e splitters and run them to a POE switch.  There's no retermination of the cables necessary at either end.

 

[intermediatic]

The Obihai 110 only support two profiles.  If you use E911 that will take up one.  The obihai 200/202 support 4 services, so could cover you, your wife, E911, and one more.  If you are keeping the home phone/FIOS you can probably just use that for 911, and get away with the 110 only.  I abandoned my home line, so I am not familiar how that all works, but the 110+ have ports for a analog line as well.  The 100 does not.

 
Yes but the 200/202 does not have an analog in. For now we still want to use that since it appears to at least be free. It serves as our E911 link. When it is time to renegotiate with Verizon, we can think about the 200/202 although perhaps the 110 will be enough or I can get an additional 100 or 202 and monkey with adding port forwarding rules.
 
 

You don't need to wire anything different for RJ11 - it's a loose fit, but it fits in the jack just fine; at the other end where all the Cat5 terminates, if you have it going to a patch panel, then just run an RJ11 phone cord from that jack to a telephone splitter - simple and clean.  I've done this on a large scale with hundreds of extensions - then when the day came to upgrade to VOIP, all I had to do was yank the telephone patch cables and splitter and replace with Cat5e splitters and run them to a POE switch.  There's no retermination of the cables necessary at either end.

Yes that seems great. What VOIP system did you go with? Our phone needs are multi-wireless handset and multi-line.

 

[tmbrown97]

I sell Grandstream so I get good prices on it; I have a combination - I have a ShoreTel phone on my home office desk that VPNs into the office system, then I've run a combination of 3CX, Asterisk, FreePBX, Cisco - but at the moment I'm just using VOIP.MS and they actually have plenty of PBX-like features including dialing between extensions, ring groups, ability to connect from anywhere via SIP client on my phone, etc.  I had moved to this when I had a sales person that worked from his own home and I didn't want him to have to connect to my house.
 
This can be tricky because eventually your home router will let go of the open port that the phone keeps open to the SIP service and eventually incoming calls stop coming in; it's fine with 1 phone usually but if you have several it can get trickier.  Grandstream phones include use of their STUN service which seems to help - the grandstream phones just work perfect every time.
 
At some point I'll rebuild my own PBX that includes video so I can do video intercoms between the rooms, a video doorbell, etc - haven't decided which one I'll use when I do that.
 
One thing I'll mention is that SIP doesn't really have a good Intercom feature built in - so if that's a desired feature, you need to look for a system that'll allow setting up one of the lines as an auto-answer on speakerphone - something that's not in every phone.  Without that, it's an extension that you must dial and someone must answer.

 

[sic0048]

One thing I'll mention is that SIP doesn't really have a good Intercom feature built in - so if that's a desired feature, you need to look for a system that'll allow setting up one of the lines as an auto-answer on speakerphone - something that's not in every phone.  Without that, it's an extension that you must dial and someone must answer.

 
I second this advice. You definitely need to read the specs of the phones you are interesting in and make sure they have the auto answer capability.  Not every SIP phone will do this unfortunately. 
 
If the phone will auto-answer, then there are two basic ways you can set up the intercom system.  First, if you add a star code before dialing the extension (like *70), then the phone will auto answer for that call.  However, it may be possible to set your phones up to auto answer on "internal calls only".  If this is in a residential setting, I prefer to set the phones up this way since most times people are not sitting next to the phone like they are in an office setting making it inconvenient up to answer the page, and you won't be interrupting meetings, etc either.  This way people don't have to dial the star code, only the extension they want to intercom with.  Of course it is really nice when you have some programmable buttons that you can use as intercom quick dials.  If you have that on all your phones, then you can just program the star code in as part of the quick dial number.  But many times cordless phones and some of the smaller, cheaper phones won't have these programmable buttons and using the auto answer feature on internal calls makes it easier for people to use the intercom system.