Step One - Junction Box
Find the junction box in your home. Most of the time, the box is located in your master closet or garage. The picture above is our junction box in our master closet. Sometimes the box will be installed onto the wall so it will look like an actual box. Sometimes the box will be installed into the wall so it will look like a metal panel (as pictured above).
Step Two - Input Signal
Open the box or remove the metal panel. This is what the inside of our junction box looked like after I was done hooking everything up. The black/red thing at the bottom was the modem/router that Verizon provided. Our junction box included an A/C outlet to power the modem/router. I had to use an extension cord because the A/C adapter for the modem/router would not fit into the junction box if I plugged it directly into the A/C outlet.
The white wires running down the right side are the coax cables that run to the different coax ports throughout the house. One of the coaxes is a line to the exterior cable box. That coax is fed into a splitter that splits the cable signal into a TV cable signal and an Internet signal.
The Internet signal is fed into the modem/router.
Step Three - Output Signal
The last step is to connect the ethernet ports throughout the house to the modem/router. The junction box contains a box where all the ethernet ports connect to. As you can see in the picture, the yellow CAT5 cables run from the various ethernet ports in the house to jumpers on the box. These jumpers then connect to ethernet ports on the bottom of the box. To activate the ports, I run CAT5 cables from these ethernet ports to the modem/router.
Notes
If your cable company provided only a modem rather than a modem/router combo, do not purchase a router to stick in the junction box with the modem. That would take up a lot of space and cost more than you really should be paying. Instead of buying the router, buy a switch or a repeater. Switches are typically a much smaller form factor and cost much less than a router. Connect the switch to the modem and then connect the ethernet ports on the switch to the ethernet ports on the box.
You will probably need another router to establish a WiFi network throughout your house. Luckily, I had one lying around. It's a bit outdated, so I ordered a new router, which should come in the next few days. In the meantime, my speeds are capped by the old router.
