Can I convert home phone jacks to ethernet?

Question

I want the ability to hardwire (ethernet) several rooms in my house back to my central DSL Modem/Linksys router?

Answer 1

yes. As long as the cable that you are using is CAT5. When you pull out the jack you will see many different color wires. Make sure that they are these colors. Brown, Brown/White, Blue, Blue/White, Orange, Orange/White, Green, Green/White. You will need to put these in the correct order in the Ethernet jack for a strait-through connection. If you are not using CAT5 there are issues with lagging.

Answer 2

It all depends on what the house was originally wired with.

If it is a new home, and the builders used Cat5 or greater, the answer is yes.

If you they used Cat 2 or 3, no.  You could make it work, but if the distances are too long, you will get MANY errors and it will be slow with intermittent problems.

Cat5 is unshielded twisted pair with 4 pairs of wires.  It allows the signals to travel approximately 100m at 1000Mbps without too much attenuation (causes errors).

If your house is not wired, think about going wireless as long as you remove your SSID and encrypt it with WPA2 with a SOLID / Complex preshared key!

EDIT - John... He ONLY wants to use the wiring that is currently in his house!  Of course if he uses it, he will not be using it for PHONES at the same time!  He should also know that he will have to retip the wiring.

Additionally, Cat2 CAN be used (even if untwisted) for shorter runs.  I have done this with 2 pair straight thru and it worked temporarily until I got Cat5 that I needed.

Answer 3

you can not do this you need a modem

Answer 4

No - You cannot!!! Please DON'T Here's why

First and most important - phone systems use a 75  volt pulsed voltage as a ringer signal. If you connect a phone line to an Ethernet Port, the ringer voltage will destroy the Ethernet adapter and could destroy your computer

Second - the plugs and wiring are not the same - an Ethernet plug (RJ-45) will not plug into a phone jack

Third - The wire itself used for telephone is not rates for Ethernet. It will not work

If you want to wire some rooms, run new Cat5 cable and install new RJ-45 receptacles

Answer 5

All you need to do is re-wire the cables to an RJ45 keystone jack on both ends, thus removing the RJ11 type instead.  As you stated it's cat5, so contrary to what others said, there is no need to run new cabling since it is already in place.  The hard part has already been done.

You will however, in addition to purchasing the RJ45 keystones, you would probably need to purchase new wall plates since the RJ45 keystones are a little bigger than the RJ11 and won't fit in the current wall plate.