Scott Hall <sch8489@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>
> is _that_ what all those extra wires are for? wow, I'd been wondering.
> I've been rewiring my mom's house (just the phones) off and on for a few
> months now--strangest setup you've ever seen, phones looped, not looped,
> pull off any given jack and there are 6 sets of wires hooked up to it, but
> <...>
If you are re-wiring the house, and can, use new wire. You only need two
pair wire (black, red, yellow, green). Buy new RJ-11 jacks (the thing's that
the modular plugs go into) to go with the new wire. As someone else
pointed out, only the middle two pair are used for the phone (some phone
cords only have the middle two wires). The outer pair have been used for
various things at various times, such as the light circuit for the old princess
phones in the old days. However, now days, the outer pair is typically used
for a second phone line - that's how you can have a two line phone that
plugs in with only one plug. Or you can use an adapter that crosses the
inner and outer pair so one phone uses one line, and the other phone (or
modem) uses the other line.
If you buy new wire and connectors, you can just follow the color coding
on the connectors, and everything should work okay. If you re-use the
existing wires, then you need to do some trouble shooting with a continuity
checker to determine which wire is which. That's what I had to do in my
house -it's wiring was all screwed up too...
By the way, you can connect all the jacks in parallel, and it all should
work fine...
Oh, and shop around for the jacks if you need more than just one or two
of them. Electrical supply places can have them for 1/4 the cost of
Wal-Mart or some place like that. The wire too...
Now, if you want to know about running 7,000 feet of Cat-5 cabling,
100+ RJ-45 wall jacks, patch panel, phone/voice mail system, and
network hubs in a church - as an unpaid volunteer - I can give you
few hints ... 8-/
Tim Mullen - I don't do this for a living, just had to figure it all out for
network and modem lines
Chantilly, VA
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