Is your headache from the question network panel?
Is your headache from the question network panel?
I'm not a big tech person, but my router finally worked after I opened up the box. It looked like a real disaster when someone left it that way to me, and I'm worried if this can actually work for my cat6 port in the office across the hall. I took the port off the wall in my office and saw that it was labeled cat6 with eight wires coming out of it. Any help would be appreciated before I spend over $1000 on someone to come fix it. Here are some photos: https://imgur.com/a/ryqYdJT View: https://imgur.com/a/ryqYdJT
It looks worse than it actually is. I don't think it would look like a nightmare if you pulled all those wires out of the closet. They left some extra cable loose in the cabinet so you could add a network switch later. Normally, that special box labeled "ATT ONT" with the red wire should go into your router's WAN side. Everything else goes into the LAN ports on your router and everything will work fine at that point. If you don't have enough ports, you can buy a little switch to hold all those wires together. You just leave out the red cable for now because it only goes to the router's WAN port. Then run one wire from the switch back to your router's LAN port.
It's just about locating the cable and connecting RJ45 plugs to it. You can use a cheap tool like this to figure out which wires go where, then test if your connections are right. Maybe you want to add a small patch panel to that cabinet instead of just taping ends directly to all the wires, but it's up to you. The exact way you plug things in depends on where the router is placed; they might have some kind of one ONT inside the box too. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TMDFG3W
It looks messier than it actually is. It doesn't look like a nightmare to me. If you take all those long cables out of the closet, the room won't be cluttered anymore. They left some extra cable slack inside the cabinet so you could add a network switch later. Normally that special box called an ATT ONT would connect via its red cable to the WAN part of your router. All other cables would go into the LAN ports on your router and everything should work fine at this stage. If your router doesn't have enough ports, you can buy a network switch to hold all those cables except for that red ONT cable which still plugs into the router's WAN line. Then just plug one wire from the switch into a LAN port on your router.