If they are just ethernet CAT5 connections then yes they can be connected to a switch which in turn can be connected to RJ45 connection on the modem/gateway.
When I built my house I also put in ethernet connections in livingroom, bedrooms, offce. The gateway is in my server room in the basement. All roue to the server room and are connected to my gigabit switch which is connected to my gateway RJ45 connection.
Simple networking is all it is.
Make sure that the place where the gateway is also has a ethernet jack that routes back to where all ethernet connections meet. This is where you will place a gigabit switch (or other switch). Also make sure that room with the gateway has coax cable connetion, gateway connects to the worl via coax. (or you may have fiber from rogers, not sure).
Ethernet connections in new houses are the exception. Everybody is expecting wifi to be used. I had my house custom built with extras.
@dm20141, fwiw, I’ve lost track of how many posts I’ve responded to where the homeowner built a new home without cabling, believing that wifi will support everything in the home. Weeks or a few short months after moving in, the neighborhood has built up and now the owner is competing with all of the other nearby homeowners for wifi transmit time. Wifi performance has taken a dive and now the homeowner is looking for options to improve internal and external throughput. That’s the worst case scenario….. From the way it looks, your ahead of the game, so to speak.
Personal opinion, you can’t have enough cabling in your home. How to you get fast wifi? With supporting cabling …… No cables, no really fast wifi.
As @Biollw indicated, you need RG-6 cabling to support any modem location. So, if you only have one cable port in the house, you’re restricted to that room, or possibly the basement to install the modem. Either one of those might not be a great place to support wifi throughout the house, or to support any tv set top boxes if you're going to run Rogers Xfinity TV service.
If you’re not aware, or haven’t kept up with today’s modems used by the large ISPS, they are all-in-one Gateway units. That is to say, the modem can run in a default Gateway mode to provide, internet, wifi and telephone services. Cable gateways will have a Bridge mode where the modem will operate as a modem only, which will typically be followed by a customer supplied router to run the customers home network. Bell’s fibre modem does have a Bridge mode but apparently residential customers are not allowed to use it. Residential customers have to resort to using a Demiliterized zone (DMZ) pass-through mode to attempt to emulate a cable modem’s Bridge mode.
The days of separate modems for internet, tv and telephone are long gone. Today’s modems support all services from one box. That is both a good thing and a bad thing. From a connect to the outside cable perspective, a single modem simplifies installation. A single modem is also a pain as today’s house wiring does not recognize the shift to single modem technology. Typically the RG-6 cabling, Cat-5e/6/7/8 ethernet and Cat-5e/6 telephone wiring start in the basement or main floor comms cabinet, in the structured wiring cabinet, and branch out from there to the rest of the house. The location of that structured wiring cabinet is not a great location for wifi networks transmitted by the modem. That becomes problematic when you run the tv set top boxes via wifi instead of ethernet or have rooms in the house which are some distance from the structured wiring cabinet. So, when you end up parking the modem somewhere near the center of the house to overcome wifi performance issues, you may not have access to ethernet or telephone backhaul wiring to connect to the wiring that connects the rest of the house.
So, here is where installing RG-6 coax and extra runs of CAT Cat-5e/6/7/8 ethernet cabling comes into play. If for example you have locations on the main floor of your home with no cabling or just CAT Cat-5e/6/7/8 ethernet cabling installed, but no coax, you have time to install RG-6 quad shield coax to that location from the basement. I’m assuming that your basement isn’t finished if this is a new house. Running additional cabling up thru the floor into the wall space shouldn’t be terribly difficult. Careful measurement is required but this can be done. You can do that yourself or call someone in. The time to do it is now, before you finish the basement ceiling.
Just to point out, you own all of the cabling in your home. Its your choice as to what to do with it, and your choice to install additional cabling if you choose to do so. If you’re looking to completely finish the cabling you will need some tools and a test capability to ensure the that the cabling is installed correctly and operating correctly. Or, you can call someone in if you prefer, to install additional cabling.
What to expect and what to look for?
If your house cable installer has done his job, you should see an RG-6 cable sitting outside of the house wall, near the electrical power meter, running out from the house wall. If you have a garage with the meter on the outside wall, you might see that RG-6 cable running inside the garage, from the meter location down to the basement, or possibly to a main floor comms closet if you don’t have a basement. If Rogers has provided any service to the neighbourhood prior to the house building there might be an RG-6 cable that is sitting at the side of the house, on the ground, near the power meter. In the case of underground cabling, that cable will run to the local tap, which is a green pedestal about waist high. That pedestal contains the local tap which essentially is an overgrown splitter that provides data services to the houses to the left and right of yours. You should be able to see that local tap from your front door if in fact you have cable services in your neighbourhood instead of fibre. If your neighbourhood has overhead cabling, you might see an RG-6 cable running off to the nearest telephone pole. If this is a new build neighbourhood, I would think that it would have been serviced with fibre runs.
Assuming that you have cable service, the installer will mount a Network Interface Device (NID) on the side of the house, close to the electrical meter. That is a small grey nylon box that contains a cable ground. The inbound cable from the Rogers network connects to one side of the cable ground, the house cable from the basement connects to the other side of the cable ground. The cable ground point is connected to the house electrical meter with a clamp, to provide a ground path in the event of a nearby lightning strike or cable voltage spike. That ground point is to protect the house equipment from any overvoltage. That NID serves as the demarcation point for the cabling. Up to the NID, from Rogers network, Rogers owns that cabling. From the NID to the basement and all thru the house, that is your cabling. Its really the homeowners responsibility to take care of that cabling. Rogers does everyone a favor when it comes to installing new cabling and will typically install any necessary cabling. Of course, you’re charged for this.
That cable from the NID will run down to the basement or main floor structured wiring cabinet. At that point, the inbound cable will be connected to one of the house runs, that heads upstairs to the preferred modem location. The two cables will be connected with an F-81 barrel connector which looks like this:
https://www.homedepot.ca/product/ideal-3ghz-f-splice-adapter-10-pack-/1000751479
That cable run upstairs will then be connected to the modem via short RG-6 cable from the wallport. From there, if you wanted to connect the rest of the house via ethernet, you need an ethernet run back down to the structured wiring cabinet, which is connected to a gigabit or multi-gigabit switch, which is then connected to the remaining house ethernet cabling at the structured wiring cabinet. The result is a house ethernet system.
So, if you’re looking for flexibility in terms of where to park the modem, you might need to run more RG-6 coax runs.
If you also need to run a telephone cable back to the structured wiring cabinet if you have chosen to use a home phone, you would need an additional Cat-5e/6 cable run back to the structured wiring cabinet. From there you could use any ethernet run to provide telephone services to a room by also using an adapter cable that converts an RJ-45 connector to RJ-11 connector. That’s a simple way to use ethernet cabling to support ethernet or telephone use.
Fwiw, here’s the latest Xfinity modems that Roges uses can be seen in the upper left of the modems on this page:
https://www.rogers.com/support/internet/setup-install
Here’s the comparison between the modems:
https://support.shaw.ca/t5/internet-articles/guide-fibre-gateway-xb6-xb7-xb8/ta-p/5114
Note that the XB7 and XB8 modems have one port that runs 2.5 Gb/s (lower right hand Port 4). That port is a WAN / LAN port that operates as a firewalled WAN port for fibre connected homes, or as a LAN port for cable connected homes. Connected to a device that runs 2.5 Gb/s, that modem port will synchronize at 2.5 Gb/s no matter what your subscribed internet rate happens to be.
In the case of a fibre connected home, the fibre will connect to a Nokia Optical Network Terminal (ONT) which will provide a multi-gigabit ethernet port capable of running 1, 2.5, 5 or 10 Gb/s. The ONT connects to the modem via the modem’s port 4. The end result of this is the limitation of 1.0 Gb/s via ethernet thru the modem’s ports 1 to 3. You can replace the modem with a router that has multi-gigabit ports on it which allows you to run 2.5 Gb/s connected devices throughout the house by using a follow on multi-gigabit switch. That's not a Rogers supported configuration, but it does work. Rogers will only support their equipment, running in their configuration, so, for customers who go down this route, they have to keep the modem close at hand in the event that they have to swap the modem back in place for troubleshooting purposes.
In the case of a cable connected service, port 4 can provide data rates above 1 Gb/s, ranging up to the 2 Gb/s plan that is currently offered. Connected to a multi-gigabit switch, you can provide data rates above 1 Gb/s throughout the house.
The multi-gigabit standard was created to allow users to run 2.5, 5, and possibly 10 Gb/s over Cat-5e cabling. Here’s a Wikipedia link for those standards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2.5GBASE-T_and_5GBASE-T
Here’s a link for multi-gig switches:
https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=multi-gigabit+switch
Other food for thought, for faster data rates via wifi, if you buy a mesh network where the main router and satellite units have 2.5 Gb/s ports, you should be able to run the satellite backhaul via ethernet. Running over a 2.5 Gb/s wired network, you should see very fast data rates throughout the house as the satellite units don’t have to rely on the same 5 Ghz or possibly 6 Ghz wifi networks to provide both front haul and backhaul capability. Rogers does have pods to connect to the modem, but, mesh networks that are on the market can easily beat the wifi data rates of Rogers pods.
Lastly, it appears that Rogers and Bell use the same fibre drop cable which runs into the home. The fibre cable to the house is a fairly inflexible fibre cable that is connected to the fibre drop cable. Same idea as the coax installation. The drop cable runs into the house where it terminates at some relevant location. If you’re thinking ahead of the game, you should consider providing a path to a main floor location that is easily accessible, either by virtue of the cable path thru the house, or by using a installing a low voltage conduit in required locations that can support cables of any low voltage type. It appears that fibre installers tend to bring the fibre cable to the same location at the electrical meter, so, if you think about a cable path into the house and then to a preferred location, that applies to both coax and fibre cabling.
Installers are only allotted a specific amount of time to install a service from scratch. If you can provide an easy path into the house, to the final install location, it could save you a lot of grief. That can be done by ensuring that the path, from end to end will accommodate a pull cable and the cable itself. The other way to do that is to install low voltage conduit such as the Carlon Liquidtight on the following link:
or possibly Carlon Electrical Nonmetallic Tubing:
https://www.amazon.ca/Carlon-Electrical-Nonmetallic-Tubing-Coil/dp/B00FY3MUUQ
The more work that you do ahead of time, in terms of determining a cable path from start to finish, the less likely you’re going tolerate a suggestion from the tech to drill thru your external wall into a living space followed by stapling the cable to your new hardwood floors.
Ok, hope this provides some info for what lies ahead and what to look for in your home.
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