Our central home network hub is now complete:

I finished the work this afternoon. This hub is the central spot where all CAT5 (data and phone) lines converge. From there, they are patched either to the phone system or to the home-built data jacks (which appear on the right side of the above picture). Right now we have support for twelve data lines in the house, but right now we're only using eight. From the jacks in the wall, they are patched to either a 16-port switch or directly to the 4-port router. The switch itself takes up one port on the router, but the other three are reserved for lines that will be used the most. Otherwise everything else (e.g. our network printer, etc) goes through the switch. Up-stream of the router is the cable modem, and then finally it's back into the wall with a coax connection (top-most outlet in the picture).

Everything was secured to the wall using some 2x3's and a 1x8 pine board. It's hard to see in the next picture because of the shadow, but the pine board is about 1.5 inches away from the wall (mounted on the 2x3's):

Adding the space behind the board allowed me to bolt on hardware and have access behind the board. The space also allowed me to wrap cables around the board to get rid of the slack in the longer cables. I bolted the switch on using the brackets it came with for mounting in a rack. It's probably not supposed to be mounted this way, but it's pretty solid:

The inside of the enclosed panel is organized chaos. It's where twelve data lines, five coax cables, three phone lines, and twelve outgoing patch lines all converge into a 1' x 1' space:

I have to confess that I haven't tested every single cable and new outlet in the basement. A single "line" consists of up to five hand-made connections, eight of which are new ones made by myself. I could test everything with my laptop but at this point I'll give myself the benefit of the doubt and just fix things later if they don't work. I don't really want to invest all of that testing time right now and I'd rather finish up other parts of the basement.

There are a couple of benefits to this new hub. One is that everything is clean. All connections are made through a jack panel. The other thing is that the entire house is now networked - great for LAN parties! Folks can plug some XBox 360's both upstairs and downstairs and play without having to run a cable down the stairwell. This'll come in handy in a few months :)