You can drop anywhere you want if you know what you are doing. Slack is _always_ a good thing if it's available.
Depending on how the house is wired, I tend to roll up some slack and tack it to the concrete board and then punch it down into a panel or cap it off with RJ45s (depending on what was required).
Mattamy homes are standard with a giant loop of cat3 wire run around the house to service all the phone jacks. Tiffanypark, Falconcrest, Coscorp and a couple of other builders are standard with home run cat5e dropped in the basement from each jack in the house. This is good for people who want to run a network connection around their house.
My own house is wired with a lot of cat5e, a 48-port patch panel, and a 24-port gig switch all racked up. Half the panel is for telephone so I can patch the ports around the house easily to network or phone. Standardizing on TIA568A makes things nice too.
I used to do a lot of this commercially and now do it in new homes after closing (so I don't get arrested or sued by the builder
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