My structured wiring panel has been a mess for years. In fact, it was never really in that good of shape. I think a lot of the problem stems from not having components that are designed to be mounted in the box. Up until now everything wold basically "hang loose", but I broke down this weekend and bought some Velcro with sticky backing. I then mounted everything to the box. You'll find (counter-clockwise from bottom right):
- 16 port 10/100 switch
- Comcast VOIP cable modem
- Linksys WRT610N Wireless router
- 2-way cable splitter. One leg goes to the cable modem the other to an amplifier.
- Cable amplifier
- Surge protector (powered by outlet in the bottom of the box)
- Four-way cable splitter. (Fed from amplifier, all four legs running up through the top of the box and out to the various rooms of the house.)
Could really use to get a punch-down block for the telephone lines. You can actually see the telephone wires as the blue wires on the left in front of the cable equipment. Today they jut twisted together. I'm conflicted about spending money on a punch-down block because I've already disconnected my POTS service and I'm contemplating cancelling VOIP service. At that point the phone lines are just going to be dead.
The Wireless router is actually not mounted in the box at this point. The tension of the various wires around it hold it in place. It's somewhat surprising that I can get a good wireless signal with the router and its antenna completely enclosed in this metal box, but it seams to work okay.
BONUS credit if you noticed that one of the CAT 5e cables are not running into the 16-port switch, but rather is plugged directly into the WRT610N. This is because this one wire is connected to my NAS. Since the WRT610N and the NAS both support gigabit we actually should get a bit better throughput to the NAS for the 802.11N network. (Well, in theory anyway).
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