This evening I finished something I've been wanting to do since I moved into our house four years ago: upgrade the central wiring panel (CWP) in my house. For some reason the builder decided that two of the bedrooms didn't deserve to have an Ethernet port in them, only cable TV coax jacks, unlike the rest of the rooms in the house. Unfortunately for me, one of those rooms is the one I use for my home office. So since I've lived here I've had my cable modem in my office and I've been relying on WiFi to distribute internet access to the rest of the house.
This has generally worked OK, but of course there were glitches and reduced speeds even with a relatively recent MIMO WiFi router. For example, sometimes streaming TV would degrade in quality (or even hang completely) when the microwave was on. WiFi was also generally unable to stream 4K uncompressed video (mkv format) from my Synology server to my Apple TV / Infuse. It was high time to ditch the wireless and get ethernet added to the two neglected bedrooms.
The electrician was here at the house working on some things for a backyard remodel we're doing, so I had him add ethernet runs to the two bedrooms while he was here. However, once everything was wired-up there wasn't any connectivity between outlets. We both scratched our heads as the CWP had a punch-down block with every cable running to it being Cat 5e, and all eight wires of each run were punched-down correctly. After the electrician left I took the punch-down block out of the CWP and examined the traces on the back side. Sure enough, it was only distributing signal for two wires, not eight—it only supported POTS! I don't know why a builder bothers to run Cat 5e and put RJ-45 jacks everywhere, but then neglects to connect everything correctly in the CWP.
So, the punch-down had to go. I replaced it with a mini patch panel, a bunch of Cat 6 patch cables, and a managed switch that I had in my office previously. Now that everything was wired correctly, every outlet can see every other outlet—I have a home network! Tonight's Apple TV watching was great. 4K movies played without a hitch, and scrubbing past commercials was faster and smoother than ever—the little PIP updated much more frequently and helped me get past the commercials much more accurately.
I bought a Klein impact punch-down tool to connect all the wires to the mini patch panel. It seemed to get the best reviews, but I was a little disappointed with it. It was comfortable to use and did a good job of setting the wires, but it didn't reliably cut the extra wire. However, the Klein radial stripper worked like a charm to quickly remove the cable jacket without cutting into the twisted pairs inside.
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