Phone Jacks

[Dejan]

Hi there,

I am moving into a home built in 1954 and I would like to install a phone jack (for internet) into one of the bedrooms that I am going to use as an office. How do I go about doing this? At this point I am not sure where the phone jack is in the house. But what I am wanting to know is how to do this from start to finish. Do I need to string wire through the walls? How complicated a thing is installing a new phone jack.

[skeezix]

I did this for the first time myself recently. For line clarity I ran a new line all the way to the phone box. Most of the time you fish the wire up from the basement or crawlspace, or down from the attic, going vertical is easy from the basement or attic compared to ripping open walls. In our case, we had a couple of tricky transition points with no crawlspace or attic available, so we brought the wire out of the house at one point, along the siding and punched back in through the to the basement at a convenient point. Just make sure you seal up the holes afterward to keep the rain out.

[HayZee518]

if you run isn't too far away from an existing phone jack you could run cat 5 wire and just staple it to the baseboard, around door openings etc and make the connection to the red-green wires in the existing jack.

[scorrpio]

Basically, you determine your point A and point B, and find the least destructive way to get them connected by a wire. Options include fishing wire through walls, running it behind baseboard, or stapling it on top. If fishing, prepare for frustrations. Walls may contain insulation, fireblocking, ducts, pipes, wires and other obstacles. Be ready to replace a whole lot more drywall than originally expected - but of course the end result is gonna be most visually pleasing.

Or, you could embrace technology and go wireless. If you want to plug your DSL modem into that jack, plug your modem into an existing jack and hook a wireless broadband router to it. If you still use dialup, there are some wireless routers that can connect to internet via a dialup modem.