Our first chore was to move the ethernet and cable modem wires from the secretary’s office to a hall closet. While I knew that we could move the ethernet cables faily easily, my main concern was the cable modem. I have created both pass through and crossover cables for computers and even made new coaxial cables for my home satellite tv connection, but making one for a cable modem was new. I had previous experience with a cable installer telling me that the connection for a cable modem is not quite the same as for a cable tv hookup.
But, since we were only talking about moving existing cable and not the connection, I was hopeful.
My first step was to create a short coaxial cable (about three feet) and place it inline between the existing cable and the modem. It looked like this:
Existing cable (from wall) –> inline coupler –> new coaxial cable –> cable modem
It worked like a charm. The signal made it through with no problem and I was able to connect to the Internet with a simple restart.
Now that I was confident we could move the coaxial and ethernet cables, we had to figure out how to get it done. After some snooping up in the attic and along the walls of each office, I decided the best way to get it done was to simply run the cables from the hall closet, into the attic (made a hole), back into the office (another hole), along the drop ceiling, through the hole in the drop ceiling and connect to the existing cable (ethernet or coaxial) via an inline coupler.
This was the hard part and took most of the evening (thank you to my wife), about three hours.
