My company is moving into a new office, and upgrading to a T1 in the process. The phone company brought the line to the basement of our new building, and we hired an electrician to bring the line into our office.
The only problem is, the cable he brought into our office (which is just hanging out of the ceiling) is not nearly long enough to reach the rack where we installed the router. So, what I’m wondering is if I can hook up a CAT-5 coupler to the T1 cable, and just use another CAT5 cable to extend it.
Will this work, or is the T1 wiring too different (or sensitive) for such a crude solution? I figure that, since a CAT5 patch cable is straight-through, there shouldn’t be any problems, but I’d like to verify that first.
You can extend it. The ordinary connectors will work. Even better is if you twist the wires together in parallel (not a butt connection that is), and solder them, and tape them into the shape of a continuous wire. This way there will be little impedance change and little reflection. In coaxial connectors they go to a great deal of trouble to keep the insulation shaped similarly all the way through the connector, but in this cable it is less important. But if you kept adding connections and wondered why it eventually didn’t work, it could be important.
A T1 signal is fairly robust. We’ve even punched it down on 4 sets of punch blocks, and run it across 2 different 50-pair cables to get it to terminate in a different suite of our building. It still gave full T1 speed and very few errors were logged on the interface card.
You may want to note the status of the lights on the card it plugs into, and make sure they come up the same once you extend it.