wiring
We moved into a new house and I see these cables in our garage. They come from the ceiling and are right near our water heater and breaker panel. There are 2 cables. One cable is labeled “System to House” and the other is labeled “Back to Main”. One of the cable jackets says that it’s CAT-5e cable, but this doesn’t look like any Ethernet cable that I’ve ever seen, especially with those weird things on the end (LEDs, sensors?)
Any idea what these are?
From this photo:
Cable modem is likely attached to the cable at the lower right corner.
Cable modem network jack goes to the internet port on your router.
Lan ports on the router are connected to the patch panel in the center. The yellow cat5/6 wires are networking to the rooms.
If you want TV's in different rooms, you can swap out which white cables are plugged into the top splitter (or get a different splitter with more ports, but the fewer times you split the signal, the better the signal is). The bottom splitter is the first split to the cable modem to give it the best signal. Yellow cable line is most likely the source, and white cable lines go to the various rooms.
Blue wires should be for telephone. I don't see where the external connection is, so if you don't have a dial tone, it may not be connected to the demarcation outside. If that's the case, either the last owner never used it, or they plugged in a voip box into a network and phone jack elsewhere in the house.
Yes, you can pull out your existing telco punchdown block and replace it with a suitable block for Ethernet networking.
What you're really looking for is a Cat 5e (or better), T-568A or T-568B compatible punchdown block with RJ45 jacks. That's TIA/EIA-568 revision B, which is essentially identical to the older AT&T 258A (Systimax) standard, which was originally designed for telephone service. T-568A and T-568B are electrically compatible as long as the same standard is used on both ends of each segment. T-568A is still the official data networking standard, but a lot of vendors use T-568B. Whichever; just make sure the same standard is used on both ends of each individual length of cable.
So a typical structured cabling solution works for phones and data networking, although a residential solution may bridge tap all of the phone lines so all the extensions ring together, and that's completely incompatible with Ethernet networking. It's also easy to bridge tap multiple RJ45 ports together in the future if that becomes desirable.
First confirm that those cables in the wall are Cat5e. If they're only Cat5, then you'll only be able to reliably use Fast Ethernet (100Mb/s), not Gigabit Ethernet (1000Mb/s).
You'll fasten your new punchdown block to the back of your media cabinet, then punch your incoming cables down to the new block. There's an example below (picture), but you can literally just walk into a big box store and grab one for $20 or so. Then you'll run short Ethernet patch cables between this punchdown block and your switch or router. T-568B is also compatible with telephones, so this upgrade won't prevent you or the next owner from using those existing wall jacks for telephone extensions later if you want to.
You'll want to confirm that your RJ45 wall jacks are wired up to the T-568B standard.
You'll fasten your switch(es) and/or router(s) to the back of your structured media enclosure as well, then you'll use short Ethernet patch cables to make connections from the switch/router ports to your wall jacks.
If you want to bridge some ports to turn on some telephone extensions in the future, you could easily do it with a little creative crimping of RJ-45 and/or RJ-11 plugs to connect all the right wires, which you would then plug into the RJ-45 jacks you want to connect phones to.
Or you could just buy a telephone interface hub similar to the one pictured below, which lets you adjust which jacks are bridged together using bridge clips. So you would snap on whatever bridge clips suit your purpose, then use regular telephone patch cables (2 or 4 wire) to connect the wall jacks to the telephone interface.
I guess I should clarify that you can plug RJ-11 (phone) plugs into RJ-45 jacks.
Best Answer
I can't quite be sure from the picture, but the red things are each joined to a wire from one of the two cables, right? If so, they're just splices, like wire nuts but for this kind of wiring.
So, this part doesn't tell us much about the purpose of the wiring. It could be any kind of signaling cable, though having the wires untwisted like that (and having only two connected, even) would not work for high-speed Ethernet.
It could be a telephone line (likely, except the labels seem a bit odd for that), part of a security system, or some kind of home automation. You will need to find the other ends of the cables to learn what they're used for.
If there are cables elsewhere that might be these but you aren't sure, you can get a "tone and probe" kit to send a signal on one of the unused wire pairs of one of the cables and wave the probe around other ends (or even through a wall) to detect where it runs.