Phone

Advice for home phone wiring and jacks with information about adding second or third line, DSL, and reference for wire color codes. Also buy wiring materials and tools here!

Wiring a jack is not difficult and it is totally fine to add a new jack or internet phone jack to your system. You should disconnect the main phone line from the source before continuing wiring a phone jack. The phone line usually comes in by your electrical panel. There will be a small box with a phone line going in and coming out.

If the telephone company has not done maintenance on your home phone line for several years, you may have an older phone box that preceded the Network Interface Device. The older boxes are simply plastic or metal covers which are screwed on to the telephone wiring box to protect it from the elements.

In most residential phone wiring, the cable contains four individual wires. Most phone wire installed in the U.S. during the second half of the 20th century is of the following kind: Four-strand wire: The kind of wire shown above has recently become obsolete. For all new telephone wiring projects, you should use Cat 5 cable.

Wiring your phone jack While the details above show a surface jack, the wiring is the same for a flush mount jack. For some reason most of today’s phone jacks still use the old color code, so unless you happen to get a phone jack that reflects the new color code, the above details and the following rules apply.

Keep in mind that the colors of the telephone wiring in your home will be typically one of two types or insulation colors. Older telephone wiring was a basic Cat-3, 4 conductor or 2-pairs with red, green, black, yellow.

The older your home the better chance you have of finding different types of phone wiring. For home built in the last ten years the wiring is supposed to meet Cat 3 Standards. Cat 5 wire now being the preferred wire. The advantage to this type of wire is that it eliminates 'cross talking' ...

The NID is generally a grey box on the outside of your home. If the wiring was installed in your home before 1988, then you will likely have a grey or black telephone protector box located inside your home, and the demarcation jack will be located within 1 metre of this box.

Telephone wiring is color-coded... In a typical home, the telephone cables connecting your phones within you home contain four wires... red, green, yellow and black. They are used in pairs for each phone line you have. Repairmen in fact refer to the wires in terms of "pairs", so technically a standard four wire telephone line has two pairs.