As I mentioned before, cables don’t belong on the side of the house. But it’s hard to get rid of everything when you have overhead utility service. Step 1 is to rip everything off the house and discard all parts that aren’t being used. Then I decided to route the telephone (yep, we have a landline) and cable directly into the exterior wall of the house. That is very easy to do when your house has no exterior wall insulation. Score one for 1890s construction.

Utilities

Those remaining wires are the grounds that tie the CATV shield and telephone lightning arrestors to the intersystem bonding termination below the electric meter. I will eventually find a neater way to run them.

Panel closed Down in the basement, I installed a Leviton structured media panel. It serves as a central termination point for cable, telephone, and network wiring.

Panel open So far I have installed the cable modem and a telephone distribution panel. Yes, I’m wiring my home for the future with exciting landline technology! There is a Cat6 punchdown block for network wiring and eventually there will be a switch, but I haven’t started installing network jacks yet. The next big project is to permanently relocate the wireless access point centrally in the house.

In the spirit of getting equipment out of the living space, I moved the Sonos ZonePlayer that powers the living room speakers to a shelf below the basement enclosure. It was easy to run some speaker wire (and cable and Cat6) up to a new wall box in the living room. No more blinky lights upstairs!

Plugs on wall