Phone Wiring

Hey, if anyone has some phone wiring knowledge, I would really appreciate some pointers here…

I have experience with network cable, but not phone. I’ve only wired rj11 phone line once before, and it was all just standard gray phone line, not Cat5.


Currently, I have an issue where I have some Cat5 running from surface mount box in a closet to two phones.

Originally, the cable terminated in this surface mount box (below). This functioned as expected:

HEIC

Now, the cabling has gotten more complicated. Where the cable was cut (above) now needs to go through an RJ45 patch panel, then to 2 RJ11 male jacks.

Patch Panel and RJ45 jack are wired as T568B. I believe this should be transparent to wiring on either end, as the patch panel is meant to act as if there were no break in the cable at all.

HEIC
(Please excuse the mismatching strain relief)

Then I have the 2 RJ11 jacks at the end of the cable wired the same as the keystone jacks that were cut off (blue-orange-ORANGE-BLUE, green-brown-BROWN-GREEN).

HEIC

And it doesn’t work… I’m pretty sure that something is getting crossed over which shouldn’t or vice versa. It’s difficult to diagnose because no two ends match. No way to use a standard cable tester…

I think it was pretty standard to run wiring for two phone lines into everyone’s house back in the day. Those wire colours look pretty standard, there are pinouts for them in google.

So you have cut this cable off and stuck it into a patch panel, so you can route it to any port in the house? Are you using the ports you can plug either an RJ11 or an RJ45 in? I think this is the standard way of doing things, so you can either plug in a phone or a network cable in the port, and patch the appropriate cable in the other end. This would seperate the two phone lines in the patch panel. If that makes sense. Then all the cabling and ports would be the same.

Typically commercial applications using rj45 terminate the two center pins for tip and ring, polarity not crucial. And the two outer pins for line seizure. Comparing that to 568b makes the (blue/w, blue) your incoming line and (or/w, brn) the outgoing. I believe its the same concept on rj11 but I’m not familiar with that.

1 Like