From phone to Ethernet
Upgrading my home network has been one of those "I'll get to it someday" projects for way too long. With fiber finally making its way into the neighborhood, I figured it was time to stop procrastinating and get more wired connections set up before the big switch to fiber.
I’ve already got a TP-Link Deco Mesh WiFi running, but a few rooms still had painfully slow, unreliable connections. While the house had some Ethernet access points, there were only three—one per floor! Meanwhile, all my computers and consoles were stuck using WiFi, which, let's be honest, wasn’t cutting it.
So, I took a closer look and discovered the media panel down in the basement. Turns out, those old telephone cables were actually Cat5e Ethernet cables (all those yellow ones up top), capable of handling speeds up to 1000Mbps. Jackpot! One of those cables is the demarc, which connects my property to the outside world—can’t mess with that—but the others? Fair game.
Why repurpose them? Well, who uses landlines anymore? I switched to magicJack ages ago and haven’t looked back since.
After making sure each wall jack had all four wire pairs intact (the whole cable, not just two pairs like with most phone lines), I was ready to put my plan into action. It was time for an upgrade!
My mission: upgrade on the cheap, reusing as much of the existing setup as possible. For the wall jacks, I swapped out the old phone connectors with RJ45 keystone jacks but kept the wall plates. Easy enough.
In the media panel, which is an OnQ model, I found an Ethernet module that fit perfectly and came with keystone jacks. That took care of most of the connections, though I needed a few extras for the wall plates.
At this point, my ISP modem was handling routing and switching duties, but with 10 Ethernet cables now in play, it was clear I needed more ports. Plus, when I do switch to fiber, the modem will change, and I'd rather not rely on whatever hardware the ISP throws at me. Better to get a solid switch in place and just connect that to the modem when the time comes.
After some research (and a colleague’s recommendation), I landed on the MikroTik CSS610-8G-2S+in switch. This thing is a steal. It’s got two SFP+ ports for up to 10Gbps each and eight 1Gbps Ethernet ports. Sure, its max non-blocking throughput is “only” 28Gbps, but for me, that’s way more than enough.