Telephone jack in another room

gta

I have telephone jacks in most of the rooms on the first floor except for one room where I am planning on putting the cable modem.

Is there a way to tap into one of the phone jacks in the other room and bring it into this room or is there another way?


I am aware of those powerline phone adapters, but I want to avoid using those if possible.

teamo

You can tap off a phone jack in one of the other rooms but the best practice is to run a a new home cable from the demarcation point where the phone line comes into the house. Is there a basement underneath this room where you want to run the new line?

gta

There is a basement, but locating the demarc point is difficult. Im not sure where to look first.

Jim Port

Look near the electric meter or service panel.

__________________
Answers based on the National Electrical Code. Local amendments may apply. Check with your local building officials.

dftc

It's probably a grey box somewhere on the outside of your house. Its the point where the phone company's line comes in and goes into your house.
While it is good to run a whole new line back to the demarcation point for some reasons, it isn't a requirement. In fact, if you look at some of your existing jacks I'd bet they are wired to another nearby jack and not back to the demarcation point. Most residential phone networks are still installed using a "Bus topology" where the jacks are connected to each other.
Going through the basement is probably the easiest route if you can do it.

gta

You might be right about the wiring. I found the grey box outside, but it seems the wire from the telco was snipped, probably by the optimum crew. There seems to be one wire going into the house though. That I confirmed by going to the basement.

I have optimum voice by the way.


Here is a picture. It is quite old, but still works.

gta

So how would I go about wiring?


Also should I use cat 3 or cat 5e cable?

sublime2

Simply tap off another Jack.
no reason to run a new line.

dftc

Cat 3 is ok, but cat 5 is better and the difference in price should be pretty small for your project.
The rest of your house probably has the old 4 wire cable anyway.
You will only use two of the wire pairs in the new cable and most of the cat 5 you will find has 4 pairs. The blue and orange pairs would be the correct ones for typical phone lines. The rest of the unused wires can be wrapped back around the cable at the ends to keep them out of the way. Your old cable probably has green, red, black, and yellow wires. With the new cable you attach the mostly blue to the red, the white with blue stripes to the green, the white with orange to the black, and the mostly orange to the yellow.
Get some kind of jack to install at the new location and run your wire. There are dozens of decent tutorials on the Internet about this topic so I won't go through it all step by step. It's not difficult however. Just take a look at how your existing jacks are wired and try to replicate that.
Make sure that you don't have any phone signal before you start. These are low-voltage lines but you can still get a decent shock if a call comes in while you are working.

gta

Thanks for the help.

But lets say I did run a wire all the way from the NID box. Do I just connect the same color wires to the terminals in the picture?

teamo

If you tap off of the terminals in the picture you would just use the same colors. Solid blue/white with blue for pair one. Solid orange/white with orange for pair two.

dftc

Yes, but I see a big mess of cut wires in the picture. Make sure at least one other cable is going into the house intact and connect your new cable to the same terminals. The goal is to tie your new jack into all the others in the house. If all of those wires are cut at the demarcation point then that won't work. You'd just be connected to a dead block on the side of your house.

sublime2

Perfect reason to just tap off another Jack that you KNOW works!

gta

I can see some wires that are not cut and they are going into the house. I do see one telephone wire in the basement that corresponds with the location of the NID box, so that must be it.

Those cut wires you see I believe were from the main telco line, but perhaps the optimum tech snipped them.


Can you splice the one telephone cable and run the line that way? Would that degrade the signal quality in any way?


I would tap into another jack, but that would require drilling additional holes to route the wires right?

dftc

The optimum tech should have cut just the wires coming into the box from the telco. I just couldn't tell if he got carried away when I was looking at the picture. If those are the only cut wires then you can connect your new cable to the same terminals that the other cable going into your house uses. That will tie everything together and won't degrade any signal quality.
You could think of the demarcation point box like a junction box for this purpose.