Here’s the trouble: the house we moved into is wired for 2 telephone lines (2 sets of jacks in many locations). When I had the phone service turned on, Verizon turned on the line with inconveniently placed jacks. I called them back to see if they could switch and for $40.00 they will.
With the new home ownership and all, though, we’re a bit short on cash, so I wanted to rewire the non-functioning, but conveniently placed jacks myself.
My understanding was that the telephone wires consist of three pairs of wires (blue-blue stripe (b-bs), orange-orange stripe (o-os), and green-green stripe in our case). Which line is going to a particular jack depends on which pair of wires is connected (in our functional jacks, the pairing is o-os, the non-functioning ones are b-bs).
But that’s where it begins to get confusing. I switched one b-bs jack to o-os, connected a phone and didn’t get a dial tone. I rechecked the functioning jack and realized that there were actually 2 telephone cables wired into the jack. Incredibly, each jack had 2 o-os pairs. I have no ides why (formerly ISDN??). None of the non-functioning b-bs jacks have this double configuration. Is this why I can’t simply swap b-bs for o-os to get service at the non-functioning jacks? Is there anything I can do to convert the non-functioning b-bs to functional o-os lines?
IANATT (telephone technician), but you might try going into the basement where the lines enter the house. If you can see the two cables, simply cut and splice to the lines you want. Good luck.
If I understand what you wrote, you have a misconception about the wires. The phone plugs are wired in series. My phone line has one pair of wires that is active. That pair goes in a plug, out of the plug and then in the next plug and out to the next one and so forth. You should see a o/os pair going in and coming out of a given plug and then going to the next plug.
Do you have an outdoor service junction plug? I forget the official name, but in my house, and also my last house, there is a service junction plug outside, where the phone line comes into the house. It’s just a normal modular plug connection, and you can just plug a phone in if you need to see if a problem is with the line or the internal house wiring. Everything from the phone company to the socket is the phone company’s responsibility, and everything from the plug on is mine.
The point is, you may have two plugs at the service junction, and just need to switch which one is plugged in.
This is a repeat of others, I suppose, but don’t switch each plug. Instead, go to the network box and change that. That should change over all the wiring. I don’t even see why you couldn’t attach both to the hot side of the box. Just watch for ringer impedence, however.
In other words, if you have twelve phones plugged in, the line isn’t going to have enough AC to ring all the phones. In fact, the ones that do ring may be a bit weak.
Have fun. Verizon is coming to my new house next week. I may have the same problem.
phones do not have to be wired in series. Theoretically any topology will work, tho in practice, you want to minimize the number of junctions between a jack and the network box, especially if you’re going to plug a modem into that jack.
so conceivably any of the following would work:
have every jack going straight to the network box
all in one big long chain
let opal do the wiring
one wire coming from the network box into your house to a junction block & split several off like a star from there.
or any combo thereof.
and for a normal one-line phone, only one pair of wires is live, generally red & green. i don’t know if it’s different for ISDN. IANATelephone Tech either, but I’ve wired dozens of phone jacks in my time. And don’t even get me started about the phone wiring i’ve had to do to fix AT&T Broadband’s screwups.
audient is correct, it doesn’t have be a series connection. I should have said often or usually - for a given set of plugs.
In any case I was trying to address your statement about not understanding why you had two same colored pairs at the same plug. To me that suggested a series connection.
I Am A Tele Tech - Audient is right on. Phones only use two wires. Your phone cord has four wires, red, green, yellow and black. It contains exactly two potential lines. I think the pairs are red/green and yellow/black, but that could be wrong, it’s been a long time. Anywho, it’s an AC circuit so don’t worry about which way they’re hooked up.
Diver, that’s not a series circuit. It may look that way if you’re standing on your head, but the reason it’s wired that way is because it’s the easiest way to wire it. The alternative would be to run a wire from the junction box for every single jack. That’d be wasteful when all you need to do is find the nearest other jack. The phone itself is in parallel with all of the other phones on the circuit.
Sounds to me like half the people here are way off.
1: Phones can never be wired in series. A phone is an open circuit until you pick the handset up off the base. If two phones wired in series, picking one up would not get you a dial tone.
2: Phones are always wired in parallel. If a pair of wires go first to one receptical, then the next, then the next, and so forth, that does not mean they are wired in series. In other words that’s not the electrical meaning of “series” (which is different from, say, in what order you install them). Series would mean that one wire goes into the first receptical to one screw, then another wire from its other screw to a screw in the second receptical, and so forth. If the wire pair goes to the first receptical, one wire on one screw and the other wire on the other screw, and the wires continue from there to the next receptical, that’s parallel - and that’s the way the phones must be wired.
3: Phone circuits are not simply AC. I think a weak DC voltage sits on the line when your phone is hung up, for instance. You shouldn’t switch the two wires. The wires are called “ring” and “tip”, a holdover from the parts of the plug they were connected to when operators worked with cables at a board. The first line is normally red and green, with (I think) red for tip and green for ring (but I could have them backwards). The second line is yellow and black. The third line is blue and white. But there are other schemes such as the one described. It’s normal to use one wire pair for one phone number - if yours are wired differently it may have been an attempt to overcome a broken wire somewhere without replacing the wire.
So maybe the advice you find here shouldn’t be trusted, and you should pick up a book. I got one at Radio Shack for $3.49 (though that was a while ago).
yes, Napier, your use of the term “in series” is correct. I was being a little sloppy. I hope most readers got my intention which was that one phone jack can be wired from the 2 wires on the terminal of another phone jack and so on. which is of course, electrically “parallel”.
Running from jack to jack is not the best way to run wiring. The preferred topology is a star layout. I’ll admit, wiring in seventeen leads to the interface junction block outside the home is not a good idea. This is why punch-down blocks were invented. I just got through (well, actually I got through at 3:00pm and then went to the OU-UNC game and just got home) installing two 25 pair blocks in my father’s home, one in the basement and one on the second floor, to correct all the problems caused by the idiot alarm tech who recently installed a new system and 71 years of wiring changes in this house. There are fourteen outlets in his home and two lines. The easiest way to solve most of the problems he was experiencing was to re-pull about half the lines and install the 66 blocks. Using a star topology will allow for easier additions, modifications, and troubleshooting of problems that come up in the next 71 years.
Now for the color coding equivalences for RJ11 6 position jacks:
New Color - Old Color - Wire ID
white/blue - green - Tip1
blue - red - Ring1
white/orange - black - Tip2
orange - yellow - Ring2
white/green - white - Tip3
green - blue - Ring3
Actually, I’m a network tech, so phone wiring I can do in my sleep. 3 pair is so easy since there’s only one commonly accepted wiring scheme. 4 pair is a different story altogether.
I used to dispatch at a small phone repair place, and you guys are really making me miss it.
Not that I could do any of it, but I did understand the instructions most of you gave.
I could tell you horror stories of customer calls and having to explain to people why certain things couldn’t be done, or why they had to go in a certain order.