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Verizon FIOS question

Discussion in 'General Chat Forum' started by TFam, Jan 4, 2022.

  1. BSH

    BSH Member

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    Some additional navigation of the Network Box:

    At the time of construction:
    Similar to choosing the decorative features of your soon to be new home at the Design studio, home buyers sat down with OpenBand to design the structured wiring in the home.
    Each home purchase included a set number of wall plates. When I purchased my TH it included 5x "MulitMedia" (MM) wall plate and 1x phone line.
    The MultiMedia wall plate includes four connections:

    1x RJ-11 6-wire telephone port
    1x RJ-45 8-wire data (Ethernet) port
    2x RG-6 coax cable port

    This MultiMedia plate was their default, go to wiring to "future proof" the house.

    note:
    • A phone line was included with OpenBand service.
    • It was and is law that satellite services not be restricted by an HOA. At the time, satellite settop boxes required two Coax cables from the dish.
    • At this time 802.11g (Wi-Fi 3) was just emerging from specification development to the retail shelves and it was four years before the first iPhone was to be unveiled, so Wi-Fi was far from commonplace.
    Each room that has a "MulitMedia" (MM) wall plate connects back to this box.

    With all that in mind, this is what I'm seeing in your box.

    BLACK and WHITE cables are Coax ports 1 and 2 for cable and/or satellite television services.
    YELLOW cables are Cat-5 cables terminated as RJ-11 phone lines in the
    BLUE cables are Cat-5 cables terminated as RJ-45 Ethernet data ports

    The Channel Vision C-0441 was the telephone punch down panel. All the Yellow cables terminated there which in turn connected back to OpenBand's telephone services which was delivered via a single DARK GREEN cable from the top. That cable is likely no longer there.

    The Channel Vision C-0331 is a combined Coax powered amplifier and 2x 8-port splitter. You should have a power brick that plugs into a wall outlet and has a female coax connection on it, and nothing else. This is the power supply for the amplifier and connects to the 12VDC port in the middle of the C-0331. OpenBand's video service would then connect to the "IN" port just below it, and the two "OUT" ports would connect to the Center port on each of the two 8-port splitters to the left and right. One of these splitters terminated the WHITE coax cables and the other the BLACK coax cables.

    The LIME GREEN DirecTV splitter is a post construction addition by the homeowner and is connecting a satellite dish to the wall plates in specific rooms.

    The BLUE cable are terminated in the Ethernet punch down and labeled 1-5. Each of these were connected to a 10/100 switch/hub which also terminated the OpenBand fiber MediaConverter.

    With the Verizon upgrade, the switch/hub was replaced with the NetGear GS308 gigabit switch.

    The Verizon ONT has the WHITE fiber optic cable input and GREEN Cat-5 Jumper to ‘port 4’.

    This is your primary Internet Connection. That ‘port 4’ connects back to the room that had the Verizon FiOS router.


    This is where things get interesting

    To connect the router back to the rest of your network there has to be a connection from that router to your GS308.

    As I noted above, All the BLUE and YELLOW cables are Cat-5, where the blue were terminated with RJ-45 data connections and yellow with RJ-11 telephone connections, but they are still just Cat-5 cabling.

    What I believe the Verizon installer did was change the phone line in the room where the Verizon router was from an RJ-11 to RJ-45 connection. They then connected the LAN port of the router to this port. To complete the connection, they also terminated the yellow wire in the box as RJ-45, added a female-to-female coupler, and connected it to the GS308 via the "random" YELLOW jumper cable.

    This SHOULD have provided wired connectivity from the Verizon Router LAN port, back to the GS308, and on to ports 1,2,3 and 5 which are connected to the GS308 via GREEN jumpers.

    The problem is/was that the yellow cable connection on the GS308 had no connection light.


    Being that in a former life I worked on the service provider side of things, I acknowledge that installers definitely make mistakes, but that is the rare exception and far from the norm.

    The reason for lack of connection is either
    • The second cable from the router to the wall was physically disconnected at the port or the router (high probability)
    • The second cable from the router to the wall was bad and needs to be replaced (moderate probability)
    • The new termination in the wall plate was done poorly and needs to be fixed. (low probability)
    • The new termination in the wall box was done poorly and needs to be fixed. (low probability)
    • The wrong cable was terminated and it never worked to begin with. (very low probability)
    My reasoning for this is that I believe that it is highly unlikely that the installer went through the considerable effort to build the new connection back from the router to the GS308, using the Cat-5 cable that was formerly (probably never) used as a phone line, and then left the site without seeing that there was at least a connection light on the GS308, confirming that their work was complete/successful.

    That aside, the problem is definitely somewhere in those 5 bullet points.

    If you’re fine with how things are set up now, then this is all educational, however moot, but if you prefer to have the Google router in that other room and the wall box cleanly closed, then that connection is where you need to focus your troubleshooting efforts.
     
    Capricorn1964 and Mike like this.
  2. Capricorn1964

    Capricorn1964 Well-Known Member

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    This is EXCELLENT stuff (and so is everything else)...best explanation on the colors as I didn't think of it this way so this is HELPFUL to those that aren't very tech-saavy!

    Thanks for chiming in as this will go a long way to help other new neighbors that aren't as knowledgeable about this stuff!
     

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