Currently, my house only has one wall plate, which uses a cat5 cable that utilizes a wall plate with pre-installed wires (blue, green, white, black, red, yellow) that the cat5 wires also connect to. From it, I use a splitter to connect to my phone and modem. I am in the process of installing data ports at other locations within my house. I pulled the incoming cat5 wire from my upstairs kitchen to my basement where I have a switch. I am unclear on how to connect the incoming line to the switch and then to my modem and phone. Especially since both the phone and modem have female RJ11 ports.
Wiring – Using an incoming cat5 cable for the phone, how can I wire it so it goes to a switch and also to the phone line
internetwiring
Related Solutions
Yes, with it being cat-5e cable, you could repurpose it as network cable by installing rj-45 jacks. Early Ethernet (10mBit & 100mBit) used two pairs (4 wires) and Gigabit typically uses all 4 pairs (all 8). Your Cat-5 link is referring to 10/100 Ethernet, so only two pairs are used. The other two pairs could carry a phone line each or another Ethernet connection (we used this on IP phones, the computer was on one half and the VOIP on the other half, figure out the color diagrams yourself for your RJ-45s on the second half). My preference is to not muck around with this as the first time you plug in a Gigabit equipped computer, you face getting full ring voltage into its RX/TX for the second set of pairs. Wire it for Gigabit using all pairs and be done with it.
In the good old days of 25 wire straight cable, daisy chain was common installation technique, with the advent of CAT-4 and above phone installations I have worked with have all been star to a central patch panel.
The current solution being installed in new homes is a "structured media enclosure" that you can install between the studs in a closet wall. Since it's between the studs, you need to make sure nothing is currently running in that space today (although an outlet that's wired from below servicing the other side of the wall would be very convenient). You want this on an interior wall so that you're not dealing with insulation. The outlet is installed as part of the enclosure and the enclosure is covered to reduce the risk of clothing blocking vents and starting a fire.
Here's a sample enclosure:
See this question for photos and a discussion about typical wiring in one of these enclosures. Your patch panel for networking, phone splitter, cable splitter, router/modem are all installed inside the panel. Typically, electrical is wired from below and all the data wiring goes through access holes in the top. When closed, no wires come out the front of the panel, everything stays inside the wall and panel.
I'd also recommend installing an access panel in the ceiling of your closet to make it easier to fish new wiring, unless there is access from above. If you're going to open up a lot of walls/ceilings to fish the wiring, then you may also want to install some conduit to each of your drops in case you want to change this network in the future without opening everything up again.
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Best Answer
Are you under the impression that you have an ethernet cable that just happens to supply phone service, but will also magically supply ethernet if you plug it into a switch?
You (appear) to have a 4 pair cable (if it's cat 5) which has probably (you're a bit unclear, but using the most likely scenario) got POTS (voice telephone, or plain old telephone service) and DSL using one pair - typically the blue pair - that's presently connected to a 3-line wall plate, but (probably) only using one line (typically the red/green pair in the center) since you mention using a splitter from that to your modem (presumably a DSL modem) and your Phone (presumably POTS.) The other 3 pairs are probably dead and doing nothing.
So, what you need wherever you relocate this cable to is to either reconnect it exactly as it was to the 3-line plate you had it terminated to before, and then to your phone (probably with a DSL filter in line there) and modem (without a DSL filter so it gets DSL), and then plug the other side of the modem into your router and your router into your switch, or if your modem is a router, plug the ethernet side of your modem/router into your switch.
The telephone side of this (POTS/DSL) has no connection to your ethernet switch.
If I'm guessing correctly, you only really need to connect the blue pair to an RJ-11 jack (Red/Green - center pair) and your splitter to your telephone and modem, or connect it to TWO RJ-11 jacks and have no splitter required. You can do that with POTS/DSL. You can't do that with Ethernet. Blue/White connects to Red, White/Blue to Green.
There are a variety of less-likely-these-days scenarios involving actually using two or three telephone lines, but they are very unlikely in the current era, and I'm having to assume a great deal, so I assume the unlikely things are not what's happening here.
Alternatively, put it back where it was, and run a cable from an Ethernet port on your Router or Modem/Router to the switch.