Pat Says...

First there's the house phone. Then I have a line I use for my home office, that I forward to wherever I happen to be traveling to. A VoIP phone gives us a second house line and a fax line. And a second VoIP phone gives me portable phone service wherever I happen to carry it to, including deep in the bowels of office buildings where cell coverage is iffy at best. No, five phone lines in a house wired for one is difficult.

The typical residential solutions to multiple lines don't work that well either. Most homes with more than one phone line just have a second line. And yeah, it's easy enough to activate the second pair (on those cables that have one, anyway!). But that still doesn't solve my dilemma. Furthermore, what had been a screw terminal for a single pair had become a mess over a month of casual reconfiguration.

That reconfiguration included the relocation of the drop from the pole, moving it from the front of the house to the back of the house; installation of a real NID outside the house; and installation of a second POTS (plain old phone service) line. I then ran a Cat5 from the NID to an RJ45 jack just inside the house. From that jack I could run a Cat5 anywhere I wanted to and build the wiring infrastructure out from there. At first it just ran to the clump of wires, and with some unconventional wiring I put a POTS and a VoIP line at the house's jacks lines 1 and 2, while putting my leaving a cordless phone and fax machine by my VoIP equipment so I wouldn't have to run wires to them.

I chose the location for all the computer equipment in a small spare room. However, that room soon became a walk-in closet, and the computer equipment began getting in the way of further developing the room into a closet. (On the side, I don't know what we're going to do when we expand the tiny adjacent bathroom into that space!) Clearly the computers needed to move, but due to lack of wiring there was nowhere to move them to.

At last the solution to my phone dilemma was in reach, though I'd been planning it for a while. That solution? Build out my data/communications infrastructure to let me relocate computers and phone equipment. And while I'm at it, put together a way to connect whatever phone lines I need to wherever they need to go.

In went a 66 block (one of those giant phone company connectors with 100 pins) to replace the old screw terminals. All phone jacks in the house got wired to it. This particular model 66 block has an RJ21X connector on it so that I can connect a cable and bring each of the phone pairs somewhere more convenient. At first I hardwired an RJ21X connector to connect each phone pair to the correct line, but that's difficult to maintain (to say the least).

Over New Year's weekend I ran, among other things, four Cat5 cables from my basement up to my third floor office. One of them is dedicated to phone service, and it carries both of my Verizon POTS landlines up from the basement; in addition, it carries the VoIP house voice and fax back down to the basement. Like the other phone lines, this one terminates at the 66 block. I also bought a 48-port patch panel and a 25' length of 25-pair cable with an RJ21X connector at the end. Putting this all together, each phone pair runs from a jack somewhere in the house, to the 66 block, through the cable, and to a port on the patch panel. By connecting the different ports together, I can route each phone line anywhere it needs to go.

This is the type of solution that is becoming commonplace in commerical offices. At first glance it appears to be overkill inside a house, but when you consider that I (a) want flexibility, and (b) have lots of phone lines for legitimate reasons, it turns into a very workable system.

My patch panel still has 23 open ports. I'm probably going to run ethernet cables to those so I can get the house online.