ethernet wiring

[jacobc]

My family and I recently bought and moved into a house that seems to be set up to have wired ethernet in most rooms. The walls in many rooms of the house have ethernet cables sticking out (they are missing the RJ45 connectors but are clearly ethernet cables). However, we have no idea where the cables go. We've searched the house for some sort of hub where all these ethernet cables meet but haven't found one. The previous owners also have no idea (even though they had the house gut-renovated 5 years ago and, one might think, should know everything about it). I was able to locate a box in one room, where the cable for TV/internet comes in from the outside. Besides cables going out from that box to various places in the house where you could connect a TV or modem, there were also a few things that look like ethernet cables in the box. They stick out at one end and go somewhere into the depths of the house at the other. I've attached several pictures of what's in this cable box.

Does anyone have ideas for how we might figure out what's going on with all the ethernet cables and, more importantly, wire the house for ethernet? The people from the cable company who set up our internet service also had no idea, unfortunately.

Thanks a lot.

 

[afjes_2016]

That large white box seems to be where they planned the Hub to be, there just is no guts to it.
I would assume that the other ends of these cables are in the rooms. It is possible they planned on implementing it but never finished it.
One of my customers had me rewire their flip both electrically and cable-wise. But we just put the ports in the rooms, ran the cables to the basement into a box like the one in your picture and left it at that.

I don't know much about Internet cabling at this time because I am retired and have not been in the field for years. I woulld assume you cann use those cables though. The hardest part is running the cables through the walls which seems is already done for you.

Maybe someone else on the forum has more knowledge and can give you betterf information than I can.

 

[Eddie_T]

There was a time that houses were wired with Cat5 cable (nomenclature may be wrong) to be ready for the future but then came wireless routers. I made that mistake with TV twin lead when I built my house fortunately just for one room.

 

[jacobc]

Thanks for the replies. My first question is, do those cables (the non-coax ones) indeed look like ethernet cables, and not something else? Second, this sounds a bit stupid, but the ethernet cables coming out of walls in various rooms are blue, and these are gray, so how can they be the same cables? Any suggestions for what I can try to do with these cables? Thanks again.

 

[bud16415]

As Eddie T mentioned it was the thing to do at one time. It will still be a faster connection than wireless, but wireless now is really fast. With cable wireless you will likely not notice the download speed one way or the other. Most of us don’t require real fast upload speed.



As an example in my house we have two cell phones, two laptops, 4 TVs, ring doorbells, a couple wireless extenders, Alexa devices and I’m sure a bunch of other things I’m forgetting and nothing is hard wired. It all works fine. Oh we also have 4 Roku devices.



If you want to figure out what goes where you need to put a signal on the end with the box and go around the house and find it. That could be as simple as a battery and testing at the other end with a flashlight bulb.