Phone connection colors for Cat5E cable?

Question

A Cat5 cable has Blue, blue/white

Brown, brown/white

Green, green/white

Orange, orange/white.

The houses' telephone wires are red and green.

Phone jack is a Cat5e type, and already punched down color for color.

What colors do I connect to the red and green.

Thank You

Answer 1

blue and blue white are considered the first two pairs. connect the red to one the green to the others. polarity is not a big deal so either way will work.

Answer 2

As long as you're consistant and use one twisted pair (two wires with the same color on them) it doesn't matter.

For example, you could use the blue & blue-white wires (which happen to be the center two wires of an eithernet cable and aren't used for 10/100 networks).  Just check the polarity with a phone tester when you're done (available at hardware stores or RadioShack) and if it's backwards swat the red/white wires to fix it.  Some phones won't care if it's backwards but other phones will either not work or have strange problems.

Our electrician used the green pair for line1 and blue pair for line2 when the house was built...I've seen some use brown, some use blue, some orange, some green...whatever.

If you run both 10/100 eithernet and telephone through the same cable, network usually uses the green and orange pairs (for consistancy with wireing type A or B network jacks) normally so I'd personally use the remaining blue and brown pairs for phone.  The color of the wires doesn't matter, as long as you keep the pairs together and don't mix up the wires.

Don't forget, RJ45 (computer network size jack type) is a different size than RJ11/RJ12 (1 line/2 line telephone size jack type).  Also, I wouldn't recommend sending telco to the same jack a computer plugs into but you could have a faceplate with a computer jack on top and phone jack on the bottom (or vice versa) - just untwist as little as possible when you connect the terminals to minimize crosstalk interference.

This may help you:

http://www.mavromatic.com/archives/00045...

http://www.incentre.net/incentre/frame/e...