I'd appreciate some advice on the best way to wire my house for ADSL2/VDSL. I did a fair amount of research then borrowed tools from an ex-sparky friend and ran many cat6 cables to all the rooms in the house. One end is terminated into a central patch panel and the other is to a keystone jack (both T568A). I started punching down ports and wondered if this is acceptable especially for cat6 (apologies for terrible phone photo):
The twists are right up to the punch down point but I'm worried about the blue pair essentially being shorter than brown at the other end. Friend says it's fine but I'm not so sure. The other way involves having where the jacket starts around the mid point but then the blue pair needs to be bent backwards to be able to be punched down. A non-flash modular cable tester says the circuit is fine and I can use it on the network. Would be good to know if this is right before I punch down the rest.
Now for the fun part. End result is installing a VDSL splitter and terminating the phone line to the patch panel. At the moment the phone cable comes in from the road and is wired directly into the master socket in one of the rooms. I opened up the master socket and it looks like this:
- Black wire from road turns into green then ends up as 2 on socket.
- Yellow wire from road turns into white then ends up as 5 on socket.
- The grey extension cable is wired to other jacks in the house (which I'll remove).
- BT is phone is a normal phone plugged in.
This socket has 2 ports, one labelled "phone" and the other "test". The BT phone is plugged into "test" (port marked with 1 in image) where the wires from road are punched into. The port marked "phone" (marked with 2 and self in image) is a very short BT cable with one end in the socket and the other curled behind and punched into itself (?!). Also the connections look rather blackened, is this normal?
The phone wire from road isn't long enough to reach the patch panel so I have a couple of choices.
->-phone wire
->-splitter
->-cat6 pair (1 pair for DSL, 1 pair for voice)
->-patch panel (1 port for DSL, 1 port for voice)
---->-DSL port RJ45 to RJ11 for modem
---->-Voice port RJ45 to phone port RJ45
->-phone wire
->-cat6 pair
->-patch panel (1 pair punched into 1 port)
->-RJ45 to in of splitter (other side of patch panel)
---->-DSL out to RJ11 for modem
---->-Voice out to RJ45 for phone port
The first one involves the splitter before patch panel and having 1 port dedicated to DSL while another is dedicated to voice and from there I can plug the modem in with RJ45 to RJ12 and use a patch cable for phone.
The second way has the splitter after the patch panel where there would be more mess in the cupboard but it would be very easy to change later. I'd need to splice RJ45 to incoming of splitter and RJ11 (DSL) and RJ45 (voice) to outputs.
Both ways require splicing cables together but with the splitter after there is one more set of joins. Other combinations involve master sockets but I'm not sure how they would fit together with the splitter there. Google indicates I should use the blue/blue-white pair of the cat6 when joining to the phone cable, does it matter which one is join to the black/yellow of wire from road? Same when installing the splitter, it doesn't matter which wire is connected to which?
TL;DR
- Is the cat6 on patch panel punched down correctly?
- What's with my crazy master socket wiring?
- Which combination of phone wire, splitter and patch panel will give best ADSL2/VDSL results?
- Do I even need a master socket? Should my current one be replaced?
Thanks!
