Is it possible to combine phone and data on single cat5e cable?

Question

I have a single cat5e cable to upstairs and would like to connect an rj11 jack for phone use and an rj45 for network use. It looks like cat3 only has 4 active pins while a single phone line only has 2 active pins. Since there are 8 wires in Cat5e cable this seems possible - appreciate any thoughts.

Answer 1

Why not ask around for a VoIP phone? It will cost less than a landline and it will use the same link as the net, with no tricks about splitting the cable. Besides, a 'phone ring' signal is some 50 or 60V so if the cable gets damaged or you make a mistake in the wiring, you could burn your network card and switch.

Answer 2

Yes you can do this if you are not using Gigabit Ethernet. 100MB Ethernet uses only 4 of the 8 wires in a Cat5e cable.

You'll still want to follow the correct pattern when you insert the 4 used wires into the RJ45 connector so that the noise gets cancelled out by the twisted wires.

The only problem I can foresee (since I haven't actually tested it) is that the phone and data signals may interfere. In all honesty, I'd be very surprised if that was a problem.

Here's a few pages that should help you:

http://www.makeitsimple.com/how-to/dyi_c...

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Network-Ca...

http://www.lanshack.com/make-cat5E.aspx

Answer 3

In theory it should be possible, but a few caveats, one, you will never get speed over 100mb for the data side, and there is a theoretical risk to the ethernet devices due to phone ringer interference.  The link below talks about it and gives the correct pinout info.