Last week I spent in Alaska. The purpose of the trip has been a purpose many trips have had as an aside, but this time it just had to get done. In Fox where my parents live only 1Mb Internet service is available. Their building also has a couple of tenants, all of which share the same Internet service. Up until last week they just had 4 modems, one person would connect to one, another to another, sometimes they didn’t all work and someone would switch out, etc. It was a big mess. To add to the logical mess of things, 10 years of wiring additions without clean and tidy installation got to be too much to handle.

The cleanup performed in 2005 – Before:

and after:

I felt pretty OK about that, but after 10 years of negligence this is where things ended up:

To start I removed… everything. I gutted all the clearly unnecessary wiring and relocated the modems to a more suitable location out of the way. This photo also includes the new patch panel which is probably the most substantial part of the cleanup, none of my before photos included the dangling wiring mess caused by the lack of a proper patch panel for the building:

Yes, I’m unwilling to provide free advertisement for the abysmal company that provides that building with Internet services.

Here you can see my punchdown work, not that I’m particularly proud of it, it is what it is:

And the dressing:

After the POE injectors were velcro’d up, router was installed and cabled, switch was installed and cabled, here is the final product:

 The patchwork between the panel and the switch leaves a bit to be desired, but there wasn’t too much I could do with it since they’re so close together. The other part of this project was some outdoor cleanup, unfortunately I didn’t grab a before picture, but here is the after:

Note the pile of cable that got removed. There was excess draped all over, some even had become part of the weed growth at the base of the building. It’s not pretty, but it’s better than it was.