Wirefest
I’m not a professional network technician, but over the last decade I seem to have acquired a lot of the necessary skills and tools associated with that trade. Yesterday I spent the better part of 2 hours trying to diagnose an intermittent telephone signal, only to discover the source of the problem was the initial wiring performed by the installer. Our telephone signal is delivered via the digital cable that carries our television and broadband connection. The incoming line is routed to a digital telephone adaptor which provides the analog lines for residential use, and these lines are tied to our internal phone system using snap “gel connectors”. I have never considered these types of connectors to be reliable, and they continue to prove my theory correct. So part of the problem was the 3-way connections originally installed by the cable technician.
When we bought the house, one of the internal wiring problems I immediately noticed was the outmoded daisy-chain telephone lines. I found that the telephone lines ran all over the house in a haphazard fashion and were frequently spliced via scotch tape (!) with the red / green wires occasionally reversed. Obviously this was not going to work for me, so I spent several days pulling all of the existing 4-conductor wire out of the walls and pulling new Cat5E home runs from each phone location back to my new network panel. This ensured that each phone line would be correctly installed and would have all 8 conductors wired. While I was at it, I also pulled runs of Cat5E for the internal data network which terminate at a gigabit switch, also at the network panel. With all new voice and data lines going back to a single network termination point, I had reason to assume my internal wiring was not the source of the issue.
Last summer the digital phone technician who came to install our voice lines couldn’t get a decent connection via the punchdown block I installed on the wall. Looking back on the problems he had, I can see that the issue actually stemmed from the gel connectors he used to patch into the voice/data adaptor. His solution was to bypass my punchdown block and wire the whole thing up using gel connectors. It was a mess and I knew it would fly apart at the slightest provocation. Eventually one or more of the connections became intermittent, which resulted in yesterday’s wiring festival. Once I isolated the telephone issue I spent about twenty minutes rewiring the primary feed such that it cleanly terminated at an otherwise unused network patch panel in my rack. I clipped each of the poorly-connected phone lines and re-terminated the lines with RJ-45 connectors, then plugged them into the patch panel. All of the old gel connectors are gone, with each line correctly wired and labeled. Everything is working again and it’s going to be a lot more reliable and easy to service. But how many people happen to have an extra network patch panel in their residence? Or a bag full of RJ-45 connectors and a crimp tool? Or the special tool that installs compression fittings on digital cable? I’m a wire geek with just enough knowledge to be annoying to real network technicians…