It wasn’t long after I bought my house that I started plans for wiring it with cat5e cable so I could have an in-house gigabit Ethernet network. I made my first cable run several months ago and then got distracted by other things and never got around to finishing it. (Literally – I never terminated one end of the cable). With a long weekend coming up, and someone around to watch Aliza (that being my long lost wife), I’ve decided to do more work on it this weekend.

My method of making the cable runs has been to use the existing phone lines (which for some strange reason are run on RJ21 cable) as guides by tieing my Ethernet cables to them, and then pulling. This of course means that when I’m done there would be no more phone lines in the house, but I figured I’d just run two ethernet cables to each room and wire the second one to a standard phone jack. (Using cat 5 cable for interior phone wiring is apparently standard these days anyway). While we do not currently have a landline phone, it is possible that we will eventually, and I figured at the least I want it to still be there if/when we ever sell the house because future owners might consider copper wiring to be a necessity. However I’m starting to rethink that. When Aliza is old enough to demand a phone will we get a landline phone or just go for a VoIP phone for the house or a cheap cell phone for her? If we sell the house in 5-10 years will anyone care about the phone wiring or will everyone be on VoIP phones for houses by then? Add to this the fact that AT&T has apparently told the FCC that it’s time to set a deadline for eliminating all land-line phones. One fifth of US homes have no land line phone, and that number is only growing. So is it worth the effort to rewire the house for traditional phone lines or is it just a waste of time?

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 11:54 am by Ari and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.