Telephone connection / LAN wiring

Hello dear home builders,

In our new build, we are currently planning the electrical installation, including LAN and telephone connection. I have already read a lot, but haven’t found a satisfactory answer anywhere on the internet specifically for my situation. An assessment from your side would therefore help me a lot:

We have a utility room in the basement, logically that is also where Telekom comes in with the telephone line. If I understood correctly, Telekom always installs a TAE socket there? And up to that point the line belongs to Telekom as well? We now want to do the network cabling in the utility room, but the router should be located on the ground floor. We have a spot where we are pretty sure we will have WiFi where it is needed. So we had planned to install a power outlet and 4 LAN connections there, one of which brings the signal from the TAE socket in the basement to the router, and 3 go back down to the patch panel/switch. So basically, I would like to go from the telephone socket to the patch panel and then up to the router.

My main question now is: Does that work? Can a network cable carry the two-wire DSL signal and if yes, which adapters would I need? And how do the two wires have to be connected to the panel?

Or is our electrician right, who says we need an (additional?) TAE socket where the router is supposed to be? Everything else would be complicated and we would need a custom-made cable... We actually want to avoid the TAE on the ground floor, for aesthetic and functional reasons (maybe the router will want to be moved somewhere else after all).

Thanks for your help and experiences...

Best regards, Björn

Hi, that is of course easily possible and I have already implemented it in 2 houses like that. You need an adapter for the ground floor. Just google "rj45 to tae" – you should take the first result from Amazon directly, then you will know what I mean. And for the LAN cable, you only need the two middle wires. From the TAE in the basement to the patch panel and there transfer the signal to the ground floor.

Where the Telekom house entry is, they also install an ApL (Abschlusspunkt Linientechnik), which is, to put it simply, a house distribution point. From there, as soon as a connection is ordered, they run it out to a TAE socket. This "first" socket / "monopoly socket" marks the transition – you have no business before that point; the router is plugged in there.

In the room where this arrives, I would also arrange the private redistribution within the house. Using so-called patch panels, you distribute your cabling in a modern way. The cabling is done "structured," meaning, among other things, that you install eight-wire cables with all wires terminated (telephony requires two, ISDN or Ethernet four others, Gigabit Ethernet all eight). This way, it doesn't matter later what is wanted at which socket and when.

That is way too complicated like this. Place the router in the basement and from there simply connect the ports to the patch panel with short cables. If you want to supply more than 4 sockets, you can put a switch next to it. For WLAN, just connect an additional access point to any socket in your apartment.

Thank you very much for this response,


Maybe I just don’t get it, but what exactly is the adapter mentioned for? I have an RJ45 socket on the router, so I actually just wanted to use a short patch cable to connect the sockets on the router and in the wall...

As I understand you, that should work without any problems if I wire the TAE to the patch panel correctly? For this connection, the already existing cable from TAE to FritzBox should actually work, right? So basically directly from the telephone socket to the patch panel socket that leads to the router input?

Sorry, I just noticed my typo now. The adapter was meant to simply connect the TAE to the patch panel. You can do it without, but then you have to hardwire it. You have the electrician wire regular Cat7 with all 8 cores, some won't get a signal (completely normal and not a problem).