Want to reconnect Telus lines that Shaw disconnected for home phone

[imac007]

Shaw disconnected some Telus cables when the installed our home phone.  We no longer have that home phone and I would like to know how to reconnect these cables.  Pictures below.  Any help would be appreciated.  What I would like to do is use the existing Telus ethernet wiring for our Shaw internet.

[polecat]

@imac007  I would think shaw should do that for you.

[Nighthawk]

Shaw cutting the Telus line to the house or at the demarc is common. Telus doesn't own or control the wiring within your home though.

If you wanted to replace the faceplates on the phone jacks and use them for ethernet instead, you can do that on your own or hire an electrician. An electrician may be the best option if any of your jacks are daisy-chained / share a single cable, or if Shaw mangled the wiring somewhere. If the jacks are daisy-chained together, you'll run into issues. If your home builder wired the jacks all independently and there is one place where all the wiring meets, you'd need to install a patch panel (Example) at that location, which is fairly cheap depending on number of lines needed, and then connect a gigabit switch (Example) to all the ports on the patch panel, if you plan on keeping your Shaw router/modem where it is. You'd need some specific tools like wire strippers and a punch down tool for the patch panel and RJ45 jack face plates. Example for faceplate replacements with punch down tool. 

[imac007]

As you can see by the pictures, the house is already wired.  The jacks are in the garage.  The jacks in the house are already RJ45.  I just don't know why when I hook up the modem in the garage to use the jacks, they don't seem to work.  I just thought there was something that wasn't connected.  Not sure if there is one specific place to plug in the modem (say in IN switch).  I'll keep looking and trying.  Thanks for your suggestions.

[NFtoBC]

Without knowing where all the wires terminate, it is difficult to offer suggestions. The good thing is it appears you have ethernet throughout the house, and can re-wire the rooms to meet your current needs.

[Nighthawk · Accepted solution]

The pictures weren't visable last night when I posted. Takes a bit of time for the mods to approve photos so I was replying blind. 🙂 They are visible now.

You appear to have a smart panel in the house. I have the same brand in mine. All wires should terminate there if the house was wired correctly. If you had phone lines in the house, they should have been terminated in the punch panel in the top left of the box. I don't see any remnants of wires going there nor any others in the other photos. The 8 port patch panel in the top right of the box was for ethernet. So you did previously have five jacks wired for data until someone, I'm assuming Shaw, got busy with some wire cutters in there and mangled things pretty bad. They cut a lot of slack out of the ethernet cables and left the rewired mess dangling from that panel. The reasons none of the jacks work for data, if Shaw left the RJ45 face plates on them, is because there are no connected RJ45 jacks in that panel, and only two of the eight wires are connected to that dangling white box for phone service. A single pair is needed for phone service but for full ethernet, all four pairs are needed. Hopefully the Shaw installer didn't get creative with the wiring elsewhere in your home.

Is the black box mounted in the panel with the coax going to it one of Shaw's? It's rather large so I'm suspecting that is the modem or the VoIP gateway Shaw was using for the phone service. I just can't tell with that cover on it and I'm not familiar with Shaw's recent hardware.

You essentially need someone that can undo the damage and reconnect the ethernet lines back to the 8 port patch panel in there. Then you'd need to connect the RJ45 patch panel to your Shaw router and ensure nothing is connected the phone output on the Shaw router/VoIP box. If the modem/router is elsewhere in the house, you'll need to figure out how to get everything connected. If there's a phone/data jack near where your router is, after they're all fixed, you could connect the router to that RJ45 jack then put a gigabit switch in the panel in the garage to connect all of the other RJ45 jacks. You also carefully need to check all jacks with RJ45 face plates that you were using as phone jacks as the phone plug very well could have bent the pins inside. If it has, you may have to replace the face plates with new undamaged ones.

[imac007]

Didn't know you couldn't see the pictures.  So your telling me that when shaw installed the phone modem (which is no longer there) they would have disrupted the Telus lines.  That's not very nice.  Thanks for more info, I'll investigate when I can.  

What your telling me is if everything is connected the right way it should work.  Line into the port patch panel and out of the jacks.  

The big black thing is our Shaw gateway.

Thanks again.

[imac007]

Ok, here's the latest.  Shaw did nothing to the panel.  It was just roughed in by the builder.  I connected the ethernet ports to the patch panel.  They all work when I plug the modem into the jack in the house and then my laptop into the panel in the garage.  When I hook up a switch to the port that the modem is connected to, nothing happens.  The other jacks in the house don't work.  Unless I'm missing something, it seems straight forward to just connect the switch to the modem jack (in the patch panel) and then run the other jacks from the switch to the patch panel.  That should cover the jacks in the house.  Seems like I'm on the right track, I'll just keep trying.

[NFtoBC]

I’m confused by these sentences: “They all work when I plug the modem into the jack in the house and then my laptop into the panel in the garage.  When I hook up a switch to the port that the modem is connected to, nothing happens.”

Can you provide more detail? How are you connecting the modem to the rest of your network?

[rc]

Is the Telus jack, that you want to reuse, one that was previously used for a phone?

[imac007]

There are phone and ethernet jacks in the house.  Right now I'm just working on the ethernet ones.  I know they need to be wired differently.  I'll investigate and see if any jacks were messed with.