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I have a garage where the internet connection comes in from the ISP. The modem/router provided by the ISP has RJ45 connections for internet and an an RJ11 for a phone. At present, the garage is connected to the main house via a 50m conduit with a fiberoptic cable.

Can I run another fiber cable to carry the phone connection from the modem into the house? I would prefer to avoid cabling with metal as there have been lightning strikes in the area. I would worry the nearby trees would be hit and carry high voltage to either building.

Basic network structure:

ISP Modem Router
      |
  (Ethernet)
      |
 Media Converter
      |
  (Fiber in
  underground
   conduit)
      |
Network Switch

Some quick checking suggests I can use the blue and blue&white wires in a cat5/6 cable and terminate them in an RJ11. Can I use Cat5/Cat6 instead of phone cables My guess is that I can pop an RJ11 on one end and an RJ45 on the other before connecting to a media converter that supports 10baseT. One of those connects to the router's phone port, the other connects to the phone on the inside of the house. Sound plausible? I have plenty of ethernet tools to terminate the cables myself.

The_Stewart
  • 132

1 Answers1

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Getting a network signal converted from Rj45 to fiber and back is easy as such media-converters are a standard product made by dozens of manufacturers. You can easily get a pair of them under $100. (Don't bother with slow speed. Price difference is minimal. You might as well go for gigabit and be ready for future speed upgrades.)
Do keep in mind that the fibre-cable itself must be compatible with the fiber-optics in the converter. There are several different variants that don't always mix.

But the phone line doesn't carry a digital netwrok signal. It is purely analog and because of that it requires specialty media-converters.
POTS over fiber converters typically have a normal fiber-rj45 converter inside and connected to the RJ45 side is a micro-controller that converts the POTS signal to/from a digital data-stream that can be send over the point2point network formed by the 2 converters and the fiber-cable.

There is only a small market for those so not many people make them. They are hard to find and very expensive.

If you are worried about lightning a surge protector on each side of the phone line is probably a much cheaper alternative for the phone-line part.

Tonny
  • 33,276