How to setup prebuilt Thai Cat5e House Network?

[creative1000]

We moved into a newish home with Cat5e ports in every room. There doesn’t appear to be a hub/switch or central box where all the wires come together.

What do I need to use this setup? 

 

[tomazbodner]

The cables must go to some switch somewhere. You just need to find it. If your home comes with the wiring plan, try to find where LAN wires are connected to. Mine is in the kitchen cabinet above fridge.... Thank you, Sansiri, for putting it in the most logical place in the whole condo... Sarcasm off...

[mtls2005]

12 hours ago, creative1000 said:

We moved into a newish home with Cat5e ports in every room.

 

Can you post a picture of one of these "ports"? How many do you have in the home? How many would you plan to use?

 

Having RJ45 modular outlets is no guarantee that they are wired.

 

Have you had any internet service installed?

 

Maybe look near the main electrical panel?

 

Assuming everything is cabled and tested, then a switch (8/16 port) uplinked from your ISPs router would allow those ports to be utilized.

 

Can you ask the staff in the office on site for information? Ask a neighbor? Ask an ISP tech if you see one in the moo baan.

 

 

[recom273]

All the cables must go to a central point, so there should be a big bundle of cables somewhere or a bank of wall outlets which wouldn’t be ideal.

You need some kind of switch, something like a tp-link SG108 is not bad - then you plug an Ethernet cable from your router to the last port of the switch. 

What do you want to with your network? Stream video? iP camera? NAS? Wired Ethernet? 

[creative1000]

Thanks everyone for the replies. Glad to know I’m not going insane or stumbled across some unique networking technology (like lan over electric cable). I’ll press the office for more information.

 

Since True wired up the fibreoptic internet wifi router downstairs in my cement house, was hoping the upstairs office could use LAN to setup a 2nd wifi router for better signal + setup a media server / file server to eliminate lugging an external drive around when I switch from desktop to laptop.

Attached are the ethernet port photos. Only 4 in the house. The house owner and another neighbor confirmed they paid for LAN wiring, but were not aware of a “panel” for the cables in my house or their house.

 

[KeeTua]

With ports in each room the cables may well go up into an attic space. If you can get up into there for a view you might see where all the cables come together in a bundle and then head back down into a single wall cavity.

[recom273]

Amazing .. So true just drilled a hole in the wall, tacked a fiber cable on the skirting and gave you WiFi?

The first thing as the first poster mentioned, unscrew the wall plate and check that there is a keystone Jack, and that that is terminated to some cable.

You might find they go to the loft space, take a look - also look next to or in your electrical junction box. My house was futureproofed, 10 years ago when we had Adsl over copper, there was an conduit in the garage that appeared in the junction box, from there it was a matter of twisting the bare copper to the phone network, obviously they didn’t look too far into the future. The satellite cable was also wired to some kind of non-functional splitter in the electrical box too.

The best case scenario is that there are 4x 30m cables coiled above your office, then bring them down, maybe purchase a small network cab for the wall, a patch panel, put your switch in there, get true to come back a put fiber to your network cab. Put a NAS or server in your cab and forget it. I wouldn’t want to put computer gear in a Thai roof.

If you have a smart TV, you don’t necessarily need a wired connection to your TV, as long as the NAS/Server is on the switch that goes back to the true WiFi router, then you can stream over WiFi to your TV. (Ets: sorry you didn’t mention a TV, but still, if your computer is connected to the wired network upstairs, you can access those files easily over WiFi on your laptop or mobile device anywhere in the house)

While you are digging about in the roof, you might want to think about putting a couple of cameras in the eaves of the house ( they aren’t expensive) and running the feed back to your switch - you want a POE switch instead of the regular switch I suggested, but your NAS will record the feeds and broadcast to your phone or tablet. 

if you end up with 4 short cables behind the fridge, it’s not ideal, but there are work arounds - but let’s hope you find some cables in the roof.

 

[creative1000]

Thanks to everyone who replied. We managed to find the original engineers, and it looks like the network panel was never completed. The unfinished lan cables are sitting in the crawl space below the roof. 

The network cable installers thought the electricians would do the panel, and vice versa. In the end, the building construction crew (who weren't in charge of the electric or networking) was eager to complete all building details asap (painting, windows, floors, etc) and sealed it all up before anyone noticed the patch panel was still missing,

 

sigh... this is thailand...

 

Luckily we've been told, it won't cost too much to finish the job, since the expensive part (running cables + ethernet ports in the wall to every room) is already done.