In my continuing quest to get a network cable or two up into the study on the second floor, I decided this evening to investigate a weird wire that runs up the outside of the house, from the base of the back wall up and through the second-floor brickwork. (On the right of that picture is an obvious phone wire; it's the one on the left that has me confused.) Just on the other side of the wall that that wire goes through is a telephone jack, so I've always assumed that it was an exterior phone run that was put in by a telco installer sometime in the past. Looking into it, I got a bit of...

Good news: rather than a two-pair phone cable, the wire is a twisted-pair cable with eight wires! This gave me a little bit of hope, but given that the prior owner painted the cable from end to end, I wasn't able to read anything on the sheath to tell me whether it was network-grade cabling. Since the end at the base of the house is attached to nothing at all, I decided to slice off a six-inch bit and check it out, and that led me to the...

Bad news: it's Cat 3 cable, so it's pretty much useless for getting anything but a slow-as-molasses connection up there. And looking behind the telephone jack faceplate in the study, it doesn't look like the Cat 3 cable comes into the outlet box in a straight shot, so I don't think I can use it to pull a Cat 5 cable through the same set of holes through the brick and drywall. Knowing that a phone wire and the Cat 3 cable both go through the exterior wall, I assumed that I'd find just the two inside that outlet box, but instead I got a bit of...

Confusing news: sure enough, behind that faceplate is a phone wire connected to the jack, as well as the other end of the Cat 3 cable. But then there are the ends of three other wires in there, all phone-type cables, and I have no idea at all where they run. I've traced and accounted for every single wire in our basement and garnered no clues; I can see that a few of the three mystery wires run upward out of the outlet box, but there's truly nothing up there at all for them to run towards. It's baffling to me, and worthy of some thoughts about how to investigate further.