I am planinig to add a second home line for the downstairs. Telus can provide the second line to my home.

I am then going to daisy chain four jacks from the NID using cat5 line.

One or more of these jacks will be used for both voice and ADSL communications.

I have heard you shouldn't daisy chain(loop) phone line when it will be used for hi-speed(ADSL) connections.

Is this true? Why?

What are my other options?

Thanks

 

You will get much better results with "home run" cabling, a direct cable from the jack to the NID. Twisted pair cabling relies on the tight twisting to achieve its high speeds. Each time you go through a jack, you must untwist a portion of the cable to make the connections. These points provide spots for interference that can reduce effective speeds.

 

Thanks for the advice, I plan to follow it.

Two further questions,

1) Routing these lines. It would be very easy for me to follow a main cieling beam. On the opposite side of this 8inch wood beam runs all the 110 electrical wiring for the downstairs. The phone line and 110 line would run parallel(seperated by the wood beam) for about 20 feet.
Will this cause interferance? How far away from the lumex 110 wiring does my phone line need to be?

2)Attaching at the NID.

I will have four jacks, so four seperate cat5 lines running to the NID. I only want access to the second line at this point.
I believe cat5 has four pairs of wires, if i only attach one pair to the NID posts for the 2nd phone line, does this mean I just leave the other three pair hanigng?

With four different Cat5 lines(from the four jacks i will install) running to the NID, is there any preferred way for attaching them to the NID posts? Should they be seperated by washers, braided to gether etc...

And lastly, would you recommend cat5 as being the best line to use for this application?

Thanks again.
Sean

 

1. As a rule, the further your datacom lines are from your electric lines, the better (Ideal industries recommends 6" of spacing in their training materials.) It is also best to cross electric lines at perpendicular angles (and crossing should be avoided whenever possible.)

2. My suggestion would be to run a jumper from the NID to a punch down block, and terminate all of your Cat5 there. For what it's worth, you only need to terminate the pair of wires that is in use, the others can be left unterminated (normal procedure is to wrap them back around the cable jacket so they are out of the way.) When using a punch block, it doesn't take much effort to terminate the entire set of four pairs, then they'll be ready when you need them. Also, don't let others talk you out of this method based on having to buy a punch down tool. Yes, that is the preferred method, but Ideal includes a mini plastic tool for punching wires in most of there modular wiring products, it will work fine for the little bit of work you have to do.

3. Cat5e is definately where you want to be. Cat 3 is fine for voice applications, but installing it now limits your ability to change uses in the future (unless your wiring a wall phone jack, it's worth the little extra money to run Cat5e.) On the other end of the spectrum, don't let a salesman talk you into paying premium price for Cat6. It has not really proven itself in the marketplace. A lot of the telecom pros are saying it isn't worth the money. Besides, Cat5e will transfer at 1 GPS (gigabyte per second) with a 350 mhz bandwidth. If you need more speed than that, I would seriously consider fiber optics.