Distribution panel for multiple phone lines? [Telecom]

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AES 16 years ago

I'm looking for purchasing advice for a wiring junction box to clean up a telephone wiring mess involving half a dozen phone lines coming into my house.

The demarc location for our telephone wiring is at present a tangled mess of ancient (like, 50-year-old) wires and various weird junction boxes which are located down at the bottom of an outside utility closet and connect 5 incoming lines to a maze of wires that run all over the house. Two of these lines come from ancient lead-sheathed pairs that come up out of the ground at the bottom of the closet; the other three come from a Comcast modem mounted at chest height in the same closet

I'd like to convert all this to a some kind of good sized (say, a foot square), open-faced (no door needed or wanted), wall-mounted junction box located inside this closet, up beside the Comcast modem, with the 5 primary lines plus at least a couple of spares coming in one side (or the bottom) and connecting to the X's shown below; and each of these connected to a two-wire bus with 6 pr 8 connection points (the O's shown below) where I can attach multiple outgoing wires that will be served by each line.

X00000000 X00000000 I realize this is a trivial question, but I'd appreciate just a few brand names or vendor names where I could go to look for something like this. The objective here is not some compact, professional-grade punch block that can handle hundreds of lines, but something that will be big, open, everything visible and easily accessible, and with connectors that don't need any special tools -- just pairs of screw connectors that will take crimped on lugs, or banana plugs, or, God forbid, even Fahnestock clips (you'll notice, I can even spell that correctly).

Thanks . . .

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Tom Horne 16 years ago

You have five incoming lines; OK, so how many stations are you going to serve in the home? What do you want to end up with at the stations? Do you want the internal lines to end in modular jacks? How many of the external phone lines will need to appear at each station?

-- Tom Horne

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Robert Bonomi 16 years ago

One fairly simple, but may be considered 'overkill', approach is a patch panel of modular jacks. Use one row of jacks for each incoming line, and simply put a modular plug on each of the 'maze of wires' that run throughout the house.

Wiring the 'lines' to the patch panel jacks doesn't require any tools -- they generally have 'insulation displacement' connectors on the back side, which you just lay the wires across and snap the plastic cover over. There _are_ 'modular' plugs that don't require a crimp tool, but they're fairly expensive.

Try the search string 'ICC RJ11 modular jack' at Google's 'shopping' page , or , and you'll see lots of jack possibilities.

Then use "icc modular patch panel", with a minimum price of $10, and you'll find a bunch of possibilities for things to mount them in. The bigger ones are designed for '19" rack mount' -- a pair of wall-mount rack rails is not terribly expensive.

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Steve Stone 16 years ago

At one time I had 5 incoming lines to my home. When my Dad and I wired my house in 1988 as it was being built we used a small punch block as a central distribution point and fed all rooms using a simple star layout.

Cheap, simple, reliable.

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T 16 years ago

Actually it's better to spend a few bucks and get a 110 type punch down tool. Then you can use standard networking patch panels. They work for telecom needs too and offer another benefit. Should you eventually decide to go all VoIP you can easily switch them to be network jacks too.

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Distribution panel for multiple phone lines? [Telecom]

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