The Living Room

We needed to remove the single tv Coax box and make that a double to accommodate the 4 network port wall socket.

That done we double checked our cable run measurements by running a piece of string down the same route the cable would take.  With the measurements confirmed we cut four 16.5mtr long Ethernet cable runs.

These were fed down the old coax trunking from the loft to the living room with the help of cable rods.

For some reason the cable proved hard to feed through, but after quite a lot of tugging we managed to get all four cables down into the living room.

Sadly the journey hadn't been kind to them!  Something in the wall had shredded the outer casing, doing untold/unknown damage to the internal wiring.

Not wanting to waste time by connecting them to the wall plate and patch panel to then find they no longer work, we took the cable out and had a rethink.

A revised plan to get the cables from the loft to the living room was needed.  Fortunately the solution was simple.  We would run the cables out of the loft, down the outside of the house, drill through the exterior wall into the living room and feed the cables in that way.

Ethernet needs to be protected if put outside so a purchase of some black exterior trunking and various junction boxes was made.

The trunking was fitted to the outside wall and fed up into the loft through a hole drilled in the eaves.

A couple of junction boxes got the bottom end to the right place and after a bit of careful measuring we drilled through the wall right into the hole where the wall port was going. Nice!

Passing the cables through this was a doddle and we soon had them fed into the living room ready to be connected.

Turns out its pretty easy to connect the wiring to the wall plate.  The most important thing we were told was to make sure that we didn't undo the cable twists by more than 2.5cm.  We did our best to stick to that as undoing the twists too much affects the cables performance.

So having gone back up into the loft we connected up the wiring to the Switch and Patch Panel.

This was pretty easy too, following the same pattern as the wall plates but a thought did occur to us at this point.  We had a total of 18 Ethernet cables to connect.  They needed to be connected at both ends, so that's 36 connections each with 8 wires, that's 288 connections!!!

Anyway, our first Ethernet cables were in place and a cheapo Ethernet cable tester confirmed everything was connected to the right pins.

We had already thought of a naming convention to make it easier to see what was connected to what.  The living room ports where labelled up LIV-1 to LIV-4 the same as the corresponding ports on the Patch Panel.

A modem cable was connected to the telephone socket into LIV-4 in the living room with another going from LIV-4 on the Patch Panel to the Router.

So finally we were ready for the first major test of our LAN.  Would the Router successfully connect to the internet now it had all the necessary wires attached to it?

Yes is the short answer.  Wireless coverage was restored.

A few other little jobs completed this part of the project.

The Router and Extender were connected by Ethernet, turning the Extender into an Access Point and removing the backhaul effect.

The Switch was connected to the Router via Ethernet so its remaining 15 ports could provide internet access.  3 of those 15 were connected by a short Ethernet cable to LIV-2, LIV-3 and LIV-4 on the Patch Panel.

A final test using a laptop confirmed that LIV-2, LIV-3 and LIV-4 in the living room allowed what ever was attached to access the internet.

Part Seven - The Dinning Room