[colug-432] Phone Line Connections

[Angelo McComis]

I should clarify my earlier point about the black and yellow being deprecated.

Back in the olden days, some telephone sets had built in lamps, which
required separate low voltage power. The old Western Electric Princess
set comes to mind here. The black / yellow we see today is a holdover
from the early days of American telephone wiring wherein that pair
carried low voltage supply for sets requiring additional juice.  But
that started disappearing in the 60s/70s and wiring was just green/red
going forward.

Nowadays, you see the  black/yellow commonly used for a second line,
filtered dsl, and so on.

If you're seeing stripes and solids but not seeing red yellow green
black, then you could be seeing the inside of a cat5 or cat6 cable
that has 4 pairs.  In that bundle, blue / blue-white is the phone
pair.  Followed by green/green-white, orange/orange-white, and
brown/brown-white. In a cat5 bundle, green and orange pairs are used
for 100BaseT. All 4 pairs are used for gig.

I personally have routed the second pair with 12vdc to power the
cordless phone base that's wall mounted in my kitchen to avoid the
ugly wall wart being visible. The wall wart is patched in to just that
cable run in my basement.

This wiki article has lots more on wiring standards below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_jack


--
Angelo

On Feb 8, 2012, at 6:24 PM, Rob Funk <rfunk at funknet.net> wrote:

> On Wednesday, February 08, 2012 06:09:31 PM jep200404 at columbus.rr.com wrote:
>> On Wed, 8 Feb 2012 17:40:59 -0500, Rob Funk <rfunk at funknet.net> wrote:
>>> (My second line inside the house ended up being very useful for
>>> DSL.)
>>
>> Does DSL like a straight line with the DSL modem at the end
>> and does not like a branching topology?
>
> That's my understanding of the ideal.
>
>> Is one clean way of
>> supporting DSL and multiple telephones to have the
>> DSL/phone splitter filters where the phone service comes into
>> the house, then connect the filtered phone service to the
>> all the red/green pairs of the various phone jacks in parallel,
>> and to connect the filtered DSL service to the black/yellow
>> pair of _only_ the phone jack that will have the DSL modem on it?
>
> Yes, that's exactly our setup.
>
>> Is DSL sensitive to this kind of stuff when one is far from the
>> DSL company's modem?
>
> I'm not quite sure how far we are, but we are out in the country (though right
> next to I-70 and about a mile from Kirkersville). After we switched to this
> setup (from depending on every phone having a DSL filter), the DSL became a
> lot more reliable.
> _______________________________________________
> colug-432 mailing list
> colug-432 at colug.net
> http://lists.colug.net/mailman/listinfo/colug-432