Good day. I'm a complete newb at the physical aspects of networking. I've just recently moved into a new house in which I specified having both phone and cat6 wired to a couple of rooms. (Somewhere, someone recommended doing so.) During the electical install, the builder stated to the electricians to just run cat6 to those rooms. Before I go back to the home builder, is it possible to run _both_ an analog phone and 100 mps network thru the one set of wires? Thx. smurf.

It is possible, normally only four of the eight wires in a Cat6 cable are used. However, it all depends how the cable is terminated. An RJ11 plug for the telephone is smaller that an RG45 used on network equipment. You are going to need some kind of break-out box to seperate the telephone conductors from the network conductors. Stuart

It is never a good idea to run phone and network on the same cable. This severely limits future usage of the wire. Personally I don't use land lines anymore and most likely never will again. Old antiquated technology when you have mobile cell phones. But if you want to have phones make the contractor run cat3 [telephone wire] or an additional cat6 wire to where ever you want phones. BTW cat6 supports up to 10gigabit. Something to keep in mind when setting up that entertainment room. Imagine the power of knowing how to internet search http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/FindInfo.html

"During the electical install, the builder stated to the electricians to just run cat6 to those rooms." Then you need to wire a phone line to each room. Do not attempt to use the lan cable. Some home portable phones use remote stations up to 6 or so to connect to one master. That would be the easy route. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.

Thanks all for the very quick comments. Greatly appreciated. I've decided not to mess with the cat6 wire at all since our current phone system actually supports the one-base-many-phones situation. Now I get to go to the builder and get some moola back. :) Thanks again. smurf.

Ok, after a bit of reading, now I have some follow-up questions: (plz correct me where I'm wrong) Given that there are 4 sets of pairs in the cat6 cable, can I simply use 1 pair for the phone and 2 pair for the network? Are there any implications? Thanks again in advance. smurf.

You could but then as has been stated, you'll never be able to use all 8 pairs on a network cable and would therefore be limiting yourself to a 100 Mbps maximum bandwidth. 1000 Mbps (1 gig) uses all 4 pairs. Check with your builder and the electricians. It could be the plan is to pull separate cables for phone and network utilizing Cat6 for both. So instead of a single cable, two. We use Cat5e for phones a lot where I work and use separate cables pulled with the network cables. This allows up to 4 telephones on one cable (phone only uses 1 pair). As far as houses go, you won't save much on cabling if the plan was 2 cables per room (1 phone, 1 data) and you tell them not to pull the one for the phone. So, if the plan is, a separate cable for phone, I'd just leave it as is.