Enlighten the non-telephony savvy

Hello group!

I ran across a peculiar situation. Hopefully, I can describe it well enough in a newsgroup post...

I was working on a site where some electricians had done the network and telephone cabling. All of the CAT5 network cabling terminated into a cabinet which used a patch panel. From the patch panel, there were small patch cables connecting each live port on the panel to their switch. All of that seemed normal. However, to one side of the patch panel was a plastic box of some type. It took in two CAT5 cables on the front and then had some cabling come out of the back of it. I am guessing that they doubled up one of the cable runs to actually wire two jacks and were using this box to split the line back into two lines which could be connected to the switch. Would this make sense on CAT5 for an ethernet LAN? Is this the best way when there were open ports on the patch panel?

Thanks for any info -- just curious about why this was done this way.

Jonathan

Reply to
Jonathan Roberts
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How big was the plastic box? Were there any kind of markings on it?

Take care, Rich

God bless the USA

Reply to
Rich Piehl

It was not very big. Roughly the size of a 'standard' rectangular telephone jack (maybe 3x4 inches). It had two ports instead of one though. I didn't notice any markings but there may have been some.

Thanks for the response, Jonathan

Reply to
Jonathan Roberts

Hard to say what it was. But have, on occasions where the patch panel is full and the customer wasn't going to purchase a new one, terminated new cat 5 runs to a cat 5 jack and put it in a surface mount box on the backboard. Not the best way, but functional.

Take care, Rich

God bless the USA

Reply to
Rich Piehl

My guess would be - they needed to split the cable but did not want to use two patch panel ports for that. It makes for a non-standard solution and so it was not certified by the installer and was best to be kept separate from the rest of the system that's probably certified and warranted. You can do the split for two Ethernet connections (here is the pinout:

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) but it is much more often done for telephone.

Reply to
telecom-gear.com

Thank you for the explanation and the link!

Jonathan

Reply to
Jonathan Roberts

Thanks, Rich!

Reply to
Jonathan Roberts

Evening Jonathan;

What you are describing seems like one of these items:

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They can come in handy on a short term basis while you are getting new cable/patch panels installed. I have used them on a couple of day basis when I didn't have a small port density switch available to put at the client end of the circuit.

Jeff Little

Reply to
Jeff Little

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