Telecommunication Electrician needed

[Myria]

Hi,

we moved into a brand new house in Espoo. Unfortunately we had to change to Elisa as our new Internet provider, since Sonera obviously is not able to serve in this area. Elisa is a nightmare - no answer on the phone, no techincal support.

Now: in the basement there is an Inernet cable connected to a Krone-LSA cleat with 6 wires: 2 blue, 2 orange, 2 green. That's it - no socket! No modem-socket, no phone-socket. The Electrician has no idea how to proceed. Elisa claims, they are not responsible for the inhouse installation. BUT: We do need a socket!

Do you know a company in Helsinki or Espoo who is able to connect the 6 cables (or just the 2 right ones, since I think it's only 2 carrying the signal) to a modem- socket or a phone-socket?

HELP!!!

Kind regards
Myria

[riku2]

in the basement there is an Inernet cable connected to a Krone-LSA cleat with 6 wires: 2 blue, 2 orange, 2 green. That's it - no socket! No modem-socket, no phone-socket. The Electrician has no idea how to proceed. Elisa claims, they are not responsible for the inhouse installation. BUT: We do need a socket!

Do you mean there is a phone cable terminated in the basement? Most houses are connected to the phone network but not the Internet.

The hardest part is running the cable through the house to the right place. Your electrician sounds a bit hopeless. 6 cables with two to choose from for the connection - the maths will quickly tell you that trial and error will soon find the right ones. Especially with a DVM to help.

Is Elisa really providing your ADSL connectin? I thought they only dealt with corporate customers now and Saunalahti is for domestic customers. Or do you really an internet connection (ethernet) - but that would imply either 4x or 8x wires, not 6.

[rider1000]

Check out THIS page. You should be able to buy the connectors and a crimping tool somewhere and do it yourself, if you're feeling adventurous. Otherwise, show your electrician and hope he can figure it out...

[Jukka Aho]

Hi,

we moved into a brand new house in Espoo. Unfortunately we had to change to Elisa as our new Internet provider, since Sonera obviously is not able to serve in this area. Elisa is a nightmare - no answer on the phone, no techincal support.

Now: in the basement there is an Inernet cable connected to a Krone-LSA cleat with 6 wires: 2 blue, 2 orange, 2 green. That's it - no socket! No modem-socket, no phone-socket. The Electrician has no idea how to proceed. Elisa claims, they are not responsible for the inhouse installation. BUT: We do need a socket!

Do you know a company in Helsinki or Espoo who is able to connect the 6 cables (or just the 2 right ones, since I think it's only 2 carrying the signal) to a modem- socket or a phone-socket?

A brand new house in an urban area and no fiber to the premises? Just three plain old telephone copper pairs in the basement (presumably fished out of an underground cable provided by the local telco, which in this case happens to be Elisa) and punched into a Krone terminal block, and nothing to connect them forward to? Sounds very strange. How did that happen?

What about the rooms? You do have at least structured twisted-pair Ethernet cabling and Ethernet wall jacks (wall plates with 8P8C modular jacks) in the house? With the cables running to some central location housing a patch panel or a puny residential version of thereof (often integrated with the circuit breaker box), don't you? A new house should feature such cabling. If not, the constructor did not really know what they were doing.

There are no separate types of sockets for phones and modems. The standard phone/modem connectors in Finnish homes are Norwegian-style moderately big plugs and sockets, with three (or in some special-purpose installations, five) contacts. Since many telecom devices, including traditional phones, are manufactured for a more "international" market, they often come standard with a US-style RJ11 (6P2C) modular connector and include a three-prong adapter plug which allows connecting them to the local sockets.

New homes may omit the traditional phone sockets and telephone cabling altogether in which case you're expected to use the Ethernet cabling also for those purposes, should you ever need to route a telephone or DSL signal to one of the rooms. This is best accomplished with a custom 8P8C <-> 6P2C cable in the destination room as plugging an RJ11 (6P2C) connector directly into an 8P8C jack might damage the outermost pins of the latter.

If you do not have traditional analog (wired) telephone service to worry about, only DSL, there's no need to connect the signal from the phone company any further than to the DSL modem/router itself... in which case you only need a single phone socket of a suitable type, preferably in the location of the patch panel (so you can then connect the router both to a phone line and to the patch panel using standard Ethernet patch cables, making the Ethernet sockets in the rooms "live".)

Now, if there really is no telephone/Ethernet cabling/sockets/patch panel in the house at all - save for the telephone copper pairs in the basement - running structured Ethernet (CAT.6) cabling and installing the sockets yourself is no rocket science, and perfectly doable as a DIY project. But in case you want a professional installer to assess the situation, try these guys, for instance. (Not an endorsement, I just looked them up on the web. I don't know them but they claim to be able to handle telecom/network/electrical/antenna/burglar alarm installations.)

[Myria]

Hi, thanks for all the helpful comments!

So we ordered a plug and socket in Germany at Conrad.com, matching the Krone device at one end and our modem at the other end. (LSA plus connection to RJ45). Conrad always has the electric stuff you need. And went from there. Result: no signal. So we kind of went crazy and had the owner over with his electrician. (I am a free lance journalist and without Internet and mail I'm out of work). They worked at it for an hour or so and then gave up and kind of jelled at Elisa in Finnish on the phone. That helped.

It turned out that Elisa connected an other house to our line and forgot all about us. Very clever. The Elisa electrician then came over in a split second, cut off the plug of our modem and connected the bare wires to that Krone-device. Yes, he cut it off with a sharp knife. He ignored our fancy Conrad-connection. And connected the bare wires.

OK - if this is the Elisa way?! The house itself is well equiped with Ethernet wall sockets and wires. It was just the missing socket in the basement. There was NOTHING to plug in the modem. No Ethernet socket no Phone socket. Quote: "Just three plain old telephone copper pairs in the basement (presumably fished out of an underground cable provided by the local telco, which in this case happens to be Elisa) and punched into a Krone terminal block, and nothing to connect them forward to." Yes! - excactly like this.

We still have no socket - not for Internet nor for Phone. Just bare wires! Somehow connected. It works now. But this is so strange.

[Jukka Aho]

It turned out that Elisa connected an other house to our line and forgot all about us. Very clever. The Elisa electrician then came over in a split second, cut off the plug of our modem and connected the bare wires to that Krone-device. Yes, he cut it off with a sharp knife. He ignored our fancy Conrad-connection. And connected the bare wires.

OK - if this is the Elisa way?!

Well, if what you bought from Conrad was an “LSA plus connection to RJ45”, it sounds a lot like an Ethernet wall jack, probably in a surface mount box. (Something like this, I guess?) He maybe thought that would have been confusing as 8P8C (“RJ45”) connectors are not typically used for phone/DSL service in Finland (unless you need to route a landline/DSL signal to a remote room over existing structured wiring in an ad-hoc fashion), being primarily used for Ethernet only, and the signal you get from that telco copper pair is definitely not Ethernet but DSL. So the 8P8C jack (“RJ45” jack) would kind of like suggest the wrong thing, and for a proper connection, you would preferably need a custom-made 8P8C (“RJ45”) <-> 6P2C (RJ11) adapter cable between the wall jack and the DSL modem as well, which the installer maybe wasn’t prepared or equipped to make for you on the spot. A Finnish three-hole phone jack, or a US style wall jack with a 6P2C/6P4C/6P6C (RJ11) connector would have been a closer match to a telecom installer’s expectations.

But it’s good to hear you got it working, one way or the other. Nothing prevents you from reinstalling/refitting the line and the wall jack to your liking now that the connection works and you know which pair carries the signal.

We still have no socket - not for Internet nor for Phone. Just bare wires! Somehow connected. It works now. But this is so strange.

But you said “The house itself is well equiped with Ethernet wall sockets and wires”, so I guess you can now make those wall sockets “live” by connecting them to the router’s LAN ports at the location of the central patch panel (wherever that is in your house.) Getting the router and the DSL line/signal it uses relocated in the same cabinet as the patch panel, or in its immediate vicinity, would be pretty much a requirement, though.

Did you subscribe to a landline telephone service, too, or only DSL? If only the latter (most people don’t subscribe to the traditional landline telephone service any longer) I guess you don’t have much need for phone sockets per se, as there will be no signal/dial tone/subscriber number for landline phones without a subscription.