Testing an inherited wired home network

[shr1k]

Hi all,

(My first post on here so please be gentle )

I've recently-ish moved into a house, which the previous owner had already wired up with network cabling. In a helpful "welcome to the house, here's the quirks" letter, he'd mentioned that all the cabling is Cat6, but that over time hadn't really bothered to test or fix anything as they just used wifi all the time.

Due to the nature of my work I'm going to need a better home network than this, but realised that most of the network ports in the wall either don't work, or only deliver 10/100 Mbps.

So I had a couple of questions for yous experts on here before I go off investing in various bits of kit to get this sorted out:

1. What's a sensible way to test the ports, other than simply plugging in a laptop + network cable into it..? Is there some equipment I can use to test the port itself, or is my only option to open it up and test the cable in the wall?

2. I noticed that every network port in the wall also has a coax cable outlet next to it -- would it make sense to simply just use a MoCA setup instead, or will the effort in sorting out the network cabling be worth it?

3. I'm not averse to simply hiring someone better equipped (knowledge, skill and kit wise), so any recommendations for an organisation or tradies that do this in the West London area will be gratefully received -- although tbh, I'd rather do it myself so that I'm better in tune with the house...

Any advice/critique of my thinking and approach would be welcome -- thanks in advance!!

 

[dev_null]

Congrats on the house. I too bought a house a few years ago fully wired with "structured wiring" (multiple network/phone and coax connections), which was a gift as I prefer wired connectivity.

To answer your questions:

1) Sure, there are tools to test, and will tell you if the ports are wired correctly, but since you're trying to "sound" out the active ones, a laptop with "network connections" app opened will tell you what you need to know.

2) MoCA will never be as fast as a properly wired port using CAT5 or better, and you would need to buy new equipment for each connection.

3) Sure you could do this too, but before you do consider this:

- If this is really structured wiring, you should have a network panel in the basement or in a closet (each connection should "home run" to that panel). In one of my houses, this "panel" was in fact just all the wires stapled to a plywood panel in the basement, in another it was a proper AV panel, labeled with each room and had the network/phone and coax cables neatly arranged. FIND THAT PANEL.

- Hopefully it's near your modem/ONT, so you can plug your modem/ONT into that distribution panel (otherwise you'll need to use a port to get the internet connection to that panel).

- Once you find the panel or the home run location, check to see if there is a network switch. At both of the aforementioned homes, when I sold the property, I left behind an ancient 10/100 10-port switch, so the new owner would have connectivity from day 1. I took my nice 1G 24-port switch to use in my next place. CHECK TO SEE IF THERE IS A NETWORK SWITCH, AND WHAT SPEED ITS PORTS ARE OPERATING AT.

- Some panels have built-in switches. You may need to bypass this built-in switch.

- Once you find the switch, REPLACE IT WITH SOMETHING THAT IS FASTER (1G or 2.5G) and WITH AS MANY PORTS AS YOU WILL NEED HIGH-SPEED CONNECTIONS. I used two switches on my most recent network, because it was a large house and I wanted every port active: I used the 1G switch for all my "daily high speed" connections and the 10/100mb switch for everything else (e.g., printers). I wired a total of ~30 ports in that house (but when I left, only 10 were wired with that old 10/100 switch... did you buy my house?).

This isn't complicated, just a bit of detective work and then a purchase or two (network switch, some patch cables). Good luck!

 

[shr1k]

Thank you for the detailed response!

"Structured wiring" is a bit of oversell, unfortunately. What the previous owner (hereafter referred to as PO) appears to have done is not very structured.

There's no panel -- just a couple of cables that stick out from the wall near where the modem can be installed, which then sort of wrap around the outside of the house, and go stick out from another point in the wall (in the same living room as the modem). The PO had left an old unmanaged Netgear switch here (8-port, 10/100 -- FS108), which had the distribution cables plugged into this; no sign of a panel in place btw, it's all just a huge big mess of cables hogtied with tape and zipties.

I had the Gigabit version of the same switch handy (GS308), so popped that in to test the various network ports around the house. Now, every room in the house has one network port, and matches up to the number of wires going "out" from the switch so my starting assumption was that every room should be wired up as well. But, of the additional 4 rooms, only 2 had working ports, and only one of them got gigabit speeds

I guess I'd like to know if my best way forward is to open up all the non-functioning wall network ports, and test them individually..?

Edit: adding an image of the cabling points. Green star is modem, from where a couple of cables go out around the front of the house (red line), and come back in through the wall into a network switch indicated by the blue star, which is where the big mess of distribution cables is also located.

 

[degrub]

you will want an ethernet cable tester to verify that each run is terminated correctly ( A or B pattern) and has continuity on the individual wires. You may have to reterminate some/all of the wires at the wall plate and the central point where the switch is located.
Have you identified if the wire is CAT 5 or 5E or 6 ?

The outside run may be suspect as well if it was not exterior, direct burial, CAT 5E or 6 ethernet cable. Since that is expensive, i would doubt it is unless run by an installer or the ISP. A regular ethernet cable will survive a few years or until water gets into the wiring jacket and the wire insulation fails from water saturation. Ice in the wire will accelerate that. You might want to get the ISP to move their demarcation point from the green star to the blue star location outside the house.

 

[dev_null]

So yeah, if you've got wall plates that aren't active, you are going to need to peek inside those, and a tool like @degrub suggests would help (after verifying the physical connection behind the plate).

That outside wire is... unexpected. Can you relocate the modem to the location with the wiring? If this me, I'd have a certified exterior coax or fiber connection run to the location and co-locate the modem and the network feeds.

Can you run the red wire in the basement instead (if you have one)? Or (as I'm doing now*) get a flat CAT5 rated cable and staple it along the baseboard (or tuck it under if carpeted)? Having the modem join the switch as close as possible will reduce the likelihood that some loss of speed is due to that outside run.

The reason you might be seeing less than GB on some of these could be damaged cables, mis-connected wires (which the tool would detect) or bad patch cable (among other things).

I'd focus first on the high value connections - where do I need gig vs wifi vs low-speed wired and go from there.

The other thing to consider is the placement of your router in terms of wifi connectivity. At our most recent house, we had 2 ports available in a central area (hallway) so my connection came in to the basement (near the network panel), connected to the modem, the modem connection ran up to the router/firewall on the 2nd floor for good wifi coverage, and the LAN connection came back to the basement/network panel to go out to the rest of the (wired) connections.

* My current setup is sub-optimal because we sold our (fully-wired) house and moved to a rented townhouse. I have the modem and router on the 2nd floor for coverage, but needed a mesh router on the first floor to cover the patio. Since there is no network wiring in the townhouse, I ran a flat CAT5 cable down the stairs, stapled to the baseboard, to the mesh node on the first floor. Everything wired is either co-located with the router on the 2nd floor or attached to the mesh node on the first floor. Not perfect, but functional and easily removed when our lease is up. The flat white cable is nearly un-noticable as it is the same color as the baseboard.

 

[drinkingbird]

Thank you for the detailed response!

"Structured wiring" is a bit of oversell, unfortunately. What the previous owner (hereafter referred to as PO) appears to have done is not very structured.

There's no panel -- just a couple of cables that stick out from the wall near where the modem can be installed, which then sort of wrap around the outside of the house, and go stick out from another point in the wall (in the same living room as the modem). The PO had left an old unmanaged Netgear switch here (8-port, 10/100 -- FS108), which had the distribution cables plugged into this; no sign of a panel in place btw, it's all just a huge big mess of cables hogtied with tape and zipties.

I had the Gigabit version of the same switch handy (GS308), so popped that in to test the various network ports around the house. Now, every room in the house has one network port, and matches up to the number of wires going "out" from the switch so my starting assumption was that every room should be wired up as well. But, of the additional 4 rooms, only 2 had working ports, and only one of them got gigabit speeds

I guess I'd like to know if my best way forward is to open up all the non-functioning wall network ports, and test them individually..?

Edit: adding an image of the cabling points. Green star is modem, from where a couple of cables go out around the front of the house (red line), and come back in through the wall into a network switch indicated by the blue star, which is where the big mess of distribution cables is also located.

You're probably going to end up pulling all the wall plates. Check the coax ones too to make sure they are properly terminated (preferably compression fittings, crimp is ok but not great and I'd wonder if they got the shielding right, screw on are garbage).

For the ethernet, you can get a tester, but you'll probably look at them all anyway and visual can tell you just as much. Things I'd look for:
-The ports only coming up at 100M, they likely only connected 4 out of 8 wires (since that is all that is needed for 100M, where gig needs all 8). Or they improperly connected one and it never was an issue since they were using 100M.
-If they used stranded wire (bought long patch cords and cut one end off) those are nearly impossible to terminate properly to a standard punch-down jack. You have to use a pass through jack (female RJ45 on both ends) when doing that, so may have to crimp new ends on those wires. Even if you can get it to come up at gig with punch down, you may have a lot of errors and slowness due to a lot of the strands being cut.
-If the wire is CAT5, it might be able to do gig at short distances, but may have high error rate especially if near power or other interference. But hopefully he is right that it is all CAT6, in which case it can do 5 gigs at 100M or 10 gigs at 15-50M (depending on environment).

As the other poster mentioned if indoor rated wire was used outdoor it is prone to UV and water intrusion. In reality it can last years especially if tucked under the sill but something to check as well.

Here (US) you can get ethernet/coax testers relatively cheap, all they'll tell you is if it is wired correctly and any shorts etc. Won't tell you the throughput/quality of the run though. However there are some testers that will tell you distance of the wire (it measures the resistance and estimates) and if it comes out a lot higher than what you know the run to be, you know it is a bad quality connection. But in reality testing the run is as simple as doing an IPERF test between two PCs. If you have a managed switch in the path you can even see how many errors are on the port after the test.

If there is coax where you want the modem to be, do you even need those two outdoor ethernet runs? Or is there some sort of ONT (fiber) box involved?

In reality all the runs probably need to be checked and re-terminated. If you aren't up for that probably hiring someone reputable to do it is the way to go. All runs should be terminated as "B" on both ends, however doing both ends as "A" will work fine (not preferred though) and considering most switches support auto MDI-X these days, one end as A and the other as B will work fine in most cases too.