Situation: roommate with no phone on second floor. wiring guy forgot to put phone jacks in any room upstairs.

Now, I do have a network, so is there a way to run a phone signal through the ethernet jack in the wall, and still have a computer connected to it?

I know about wireless phone stuff, and I own one for my Tivo, but talking on one of these would not be possible, they're terrible. Tivo can barely make the daily call due to all the static. So wireless is not an option.

Phone wires are easy enough to pull, especialy if you've already run the ethernet yourself. That being said, 10/100bT only uses 4 of the 8 conductors in a wire, so in theory you should be able to run 2 phone lines on the unused conductors. You'll probably have to home-brew your own patch cables to do it, and i'm not sure how great your ethernet performance will be, but it should work fine. You should be able to buy a crimper for $20-30 bucks and read some directions on how to do it. Having a roll of cat5 around the house will come in usefull, so just buy the 1000 foor box if you can swing it.

Matthew

I'd suggest a DECT phone (digital cordless) but I'm not sure if they (or any kind of digital phone) are available in the US.

Over here you can get one for less than 50UKP.

Edit: Discovered that there are digital phones in the US, but there isn't any real standard. Saw mention of something called MARS, which seemed popular though.

Is the wireless unit you use for your TiVo digital or analogue?

Matthew's right, but instead of futzing with custom patch cables just get a two or four jack RJ-45 outlet and break out two unused pairs into the other jacks. You'll need to know which wires of course but the jacks aren't hard to wire. I did a 1-1 cable run for my parents (who'll never have more than 2 PC's) and I made the downstairs end crossover so they could use standard patch cables. This might vex the next owner of the house, but I really don't care. Just be sure to mark the outlets!

-Zeke