I’m considering clipping the cable where it enters the wall, terminating it, and buying a PoE adapter so that I can see if a single wifi router mounted in that spot will cover the whole house.
Is this a terrible idea? What should I look out for?
Get a bore scope and stick it in the cable entry point . You should at least get an idea which direction they’re going. Should help you track down the destination.
If the cable is in a wall box I would consider just stuffing it all back in the wall for now. If you cut and terminate then later find the end, you might regret that it was cut.
It’s a long shot, but get a cable tester, that might give you some idea if it is connected to a piece of equipment and just maybe how long the cable is. Of course, even if it gives you a length, it might be coiled somewhere.
It might be risky, but try plugging the cable into a device (spare switch, laptop, computer, etc) and see if you get any connection to something. I doubt it though, it is probably the connection to a different room and the cables are stuffed behind a wall plate or even into the wall.
Is the fiber modem new? Could it have been leftover from a cable modem setup? I just bought a house that is wired throughout with cat 5 and just found the concentration point. About ten, unlabeled, cables all coiled up and no connectors stashed in the ceiling of the unfinished basement. So now I need to find the ends and decide if I want that to be my network closet. Fun stuff.
Are you sure you know all the rooms in your home? Is the house bigger on the outside than you can account for on the inside?
On the roof, maybe?
Something like a wisp hiperlan antenna?
Do you see link on that Ethernet port on the fiber modem ?
Are you sure that it’s two cables and not just one that loops back?
Use an Ethernet cable tester/tracer to find where they end up.
Reusing the cable seems like a no brainer, but you may find the cable is already setup like that. Use the tracer.
Reminds me of an old motorhome we inherited from my grandparents. While my father was getting it fixed up, he had to test all the wiring…which was a bit of a chore…the dashboard was filled with custom toggle switches my grandfather had installed over the years for various purposes, not all labeled. The service manual was useless because a fire a long time back had resulted in the makeshift replacement of all the wiring, so many functions had to be determined through trial and error, and a lot of tracing.
One mystery unlabeled switch had no apparent function, and my father spent the better part of the day following the wire from the switch, as it snaked through almost every part of the motorhome, ending at…the other terminal of the switch. It was a dead loop left for future expansion, to be connected to whatever by simply cutting the loop. My grandfather would have been pleased to know his engineering had sent someone on a wild goose chase.
I think it’s more likely that one cable was for internet and one was for the phone, since that’s the manufacturer labeling on the fiber access point.
But yeah, I’ll probably put a cable tester on the Christmas list.
It’s a long shot, but have you tried contacting the previous owners? You may be able to reach them through their real estate broker.
I’ve asked the previous owner, but she didn’t seem to have any idea what her ex-husband did. (Before that, it was her parents’ house.)
There’s another long Ethernet cable that seems to be where they had their access point on the other side of the hallway, but that leads to a corner of another room where they used to have a TV.
It would make sense for the original cable to come out on that side of the hall, but it’s just not there. Maybe it’s behind the wood paneled ceiling.
Cut with a bit of slack to the wall. So if you find the other ends later, you can terminate all four cut ends and place a switch there.
Buy a toner. You can trace it through the wall by sound and figure out where it goes
Could be door bell. I have video doorbells I set up. Home builder ran cat5e to the old doorbells that terminated in the attic at the doorbell chime block. I snipped and terminated these with rj45s and mounted a small outdoor rates PoE switch in the attic to power the new video doorbells.
I have no idea which route these cables take to get where they go as they disappear under the decking in the attic. Terminating each end worked so I figured all is well.
It’s not to anything that works, because it’s not been plugged in since we moved in.
The doorbell is wireless.