Patch panel? Help!

I just moved into an apartment and every room has an outlet with two coaxial ports and to cat5e ports. In the laundry room is, what I believe to be, a patch panel. I've never worked on or setup a patch panel before so I googled a patch panel and all the panels I found a ports on it to connect a switch/router. My question is how do I connect something to this portless patch panel? Would I need to just punch down the cat5 coming from a router directly to the patch panel?

Thanks

 

Why monkey with a patch panel if you have coax and Cat5 in each room?

 

If your apt is wired back to a central point (laundry room) you should have a jack for every room in the house. If this is the case it's a central point to setup your hardware, router/switch/modem (if needed).

If you only have 2 net and 2 coax they are just std wiring back to some central point, mechanical/electrical room that house all of the ISP and tv services.

Personally if the hardware in not in my position I would setup a router for a firewall at a min. Then I would test to make sure there is not any hardware in the middle for security reasons.