Regarding ethernet Cables

Hardware Hub Networking
1

I live in a somewhat old built house and it's all brick&mortar. I screwed around several years with wireless routers, AP, extenders and ended up wiring with Cat5E cable all the way to the other end of the house where I have a secondary wireless router repeating the wifi signal.

A few days ago I had a little leak on the roof and I ended up going there to patch it. To my dismay, the cat5e external plastic sleeving was all cracked and I could see signs of water inside them.

Since my uncle used to work installing alarm systems, I have access to a pretty beefy cable I want to use: it has an external UV resistant sleeve, then a metallic layer (silver on one side, and blue on the other, resembles aluminium foil) then another transparent plastic sleeve with a bare wire (I guess it's for tension resistance purposes) and then 6 twisted pairs of ~.5mm monofilament copper cables. My idea was to use that and use the extra 2 pairs for a telephone line to move my handset's base a little closer since I tend to lose signal on my room.

Now the big and small questions:
1. Is it ok to use those extra 2 pairs for telephone line?
1.a - would that produce any kind of interference?

2. I've noticed several LAN cables on my house using only 2 pairs, why is that? is there an advantage on the whole 8 cables vs only 4 on the Ethernet?
I looked up on the web and seems like the extra pairs were for providing extra grounding for unshielded cables, but these ones have what I guess is proper shielding (the metallic layer that wraps the bunch of cables inside)

3. If only 4 cables are needed for proper ethernet on a shielded cable, could I use ethernet+phone+PoE/USB extender?

EDIT: The largest lenght I would need to wire would be around 25 meters long

2

100mbps only uses 2 pairs, gigabit uses all 8. When using 100mbps connections the extra pairs can be used for PoE (you can also do PoE with gigabit but it works differently), telephones or a second 100mbps connection. There are splitters and whatnot available for that.

I don't think there will be a problem using telephone and ethernet on the same cable as the frequencies used for telephone are much lower than that of ethernet so if there is any interference it shouldn't affect it.

3

Thanks!
Yes I'm using 1000mbps gear but even the bundled cables came with only 2 pairs. seems it's just a matter of cheapo bastards saving a penny on the bundled cable with networking gear D:<

4

Sounds like you have access to some nice outdoor shielded cabling. I wouldn't use phone in the same cable because of a bad experience I had many years ago where that exact thing would cause static on the phone or packet loss and such on my network. It was a basic unshielded cat5 but it's probably ok if you are sticking to 100mb stuff. I too was under the impression gigabit used 4 pairs, all 8 wires, of the cable so if you have the gigabit gear, I would say skip the phone.

Oh, and make your own patch cables! I never use the provided cables with anything, never have. Not worth the hassle IMO. :stuck_out_tongue:

5

you're a bit late to the party.

6

I realized that only after I posted. I figured, oh well, too much effort to delete the post. LOL

7

@MisteryAngel what we seem to have here is a good ol fashion necro... time to witch hunt and close this