As the wiring in the house gets upgraded, there’s something that has irked me for a very long time. Ever since FIOS got installed by Verizon, I’ve had a router that had the capability of using ethernet for the input line, but it’s always been coax. Coax is like stone-age technology, still used by cable internet providers. FIOS is supposed to be the next generation, fiber optic to your home. And from there, you should be “on the network”. And on the network means ethernet to me.
Since I have no television service with my Frontier plan, I can fiddle around with the coax cables in my house with impunity, except for the one that feeds my router. Ugh. And one more piece of junk in this mess, when I had some service done by Frontier and they completely switched out my ONT (outdoor network terminal), they gave me a new router. I hadn’t had an upgrade in over 15 years. This new router expects that your input signal is ethernet. Yeah! And because mine isn’t, I have to have another device that converts the coax to ethernet. So, not only will I get rid of the coax dependency, but I’ll also get rid of an extra device on my wiring shelf.
I made a purchase a couple of days ago of 50′ of outdoor, burial-grade CAT6 cable and today I ran that cable from my ONT to my patch panel. I terminated the indoor end and tested the line successfully. The last step is to have Frontier make the switch from coax to ethernet.
I got online and entered the Frontier support chat. I was #43 in the queue, but got served in under 10 minutes. Not too bad. The offshore technician “Beth” (whose screen name is really Betsabe) was helpful enough and confirmed that I could make the switch without involving a tech visit. I elected not to do it right then because, duh, we’d get cut off and I wouldn’t be able to confirm the switch was done. So it will be a phone call for another day. And assuming it all works well, I will have one less device on my shelf.
So where does that leave the house for future changes or future owners? It’s pretty flexible, really. I will have a jack that runs from my patch panel to the splitter in the attic. If I or someone else wants to activate television, just connect the router to the patch panel and it will feed the house. If for some god awful reason the internet changes to Spectrum, the splitter in the attic can be reconfigured to take the input from the exterior cable instead of from the router and send an output to the router instead of being input by the router. I will have a similar configuration for phone.