My older home has plaster walls and ceilings and is a bit of a mess from a wired network perspective and no expectation of significant recabling in the foreseeable future. During a 2003 renovation a number of cat5e cables were run to various rooms from an aggregation point that no longer serves the purpose and has to be relocated.
In short, I need to extend 9 cat5e cables ~20' and would appreciate advice on my options.
Thoughts so far:
1. A bunch of RJ45 couplers with patch cables to the new closet. Concern is quality of connection both initially and over time. The couplers would be behind an access panel, inside a wall cavity that has openings to the crawl space (sealed crawl space, but it's an old drafty house and the crawl space is musty and dirt-floor). Not possible to seal off the area from other parts of the wall cavity. Humidity, dust--and potentially insect--control would be next to impossible so I'm concerned about quality of connections over time.
2. Punch down type patch panel at existing termination point. Same as above except half as many RJ-45 connections, the other half punched down. Maybe better?
3. A bunch of punch down junction boxes. I have a few of these in my cobbled together network now and they seem to do ok although I don't have means to do any testing beyond basic continuity and observing networked PC performance. This seems the best of the options I've identified.
4. Keep a network switch in service at the current location. I've ruled this out due to various issues like ventilation, code compliance (or more to the point, safety), dust/humidity control.
It's not a high-performance network, I just don't want to do something that has high likelihood of degrading the performance I have now. Are there other options I'm not aware of? Anyone know of a punch down block that can splice several cables in one box, preferably sealed? Other?
Thanks.
In short, I need to extend 9 cat5e cables ~20' and would appreciate advice on my options.
Thoughts so far:
1. A bunch of RJ45 couplers with patch cables to the new closet. Concern is quality of connection both initially and over time. The couplers would be behind an access panel, inside a wall cavity that has openings to the crawl space (sealed crawl space, but it's an old drafty house and the crawl space is musty and dirt-floor). Not possible to seal off the area from other parts of the wall cavity. Humidity, dust--and potentially insect--control would be next to impossible so I'm concerned about quality of connections over time.
2. Punch down type patch panel at existing termination point. Same as above except half as many RJ-45 connections, the other half punched down. Maybe better?
3. A bunch of punch down junction boxes. I have a few of these in my cobbled together network now and they seem to do ok although I don't have means to do any testing beyond basic continuity and observing networked PC performance. This seems the best of the options I've identified.
4. Keep a network switch in service at the current location. I've ruled this out due to various issues like ventilation, code compliance (or more to the point, safety), dust/humidity control.
It's not a high-performance network, I just don't want to do something that has high likelihood of degrading the performance I have now. Are there other options I'm not aware of? Anyone know of a punch down block that can splice several cables in one box, preferably sealed? Other?
Thanks.
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