Ethernet and Telephone over 1 Cat5 cable

Recently I had ATT Uverse installed and came to the situation where I need to run a telephone line and an ethernet cable from one side of the room to the other. So here is my little simple solution.

A little background information first. Ethernet twisted pair cables have 4 sets of twisted pairs. A network card and switch, router, hub, etc only use 2 pairs. A telephone connection only requires 1 pair for a single line and 2 pairs of course for 2 lines. So this project capitalizes on the 2 unused pairs by the computer, and uses them for telephone connections.

Here are some of the materials I used.

1 RJ-11 Keystone Jack, 2 RJ-45 Keystone Jacks, and some Cat 5e

A standard punchdown tool to secure the connections.

And here is the diagram I put together to show how they are wired.

The Keystone jacks for the RJ45's will usually have 2 sets of color coding on them, for 2 different cabling standards. 568-A and 568-B. For this project I am using the color codes for the 568-A scheme.

Now to start the actual work..
First I took a section of Cat5e and striped off about an inch and half of the outer blue jacket.

I then untwisted the pairs and punched all the wires into a single RJ45 Keystone jack.

Notice the word "CUT" on the tool. That is to indicate that it will cut on that side of the tool.. so always make sure that is facing outwards on a keystone jack.

Here its with all the wires punched into place.

Snap the covers on and it almost looks pro :D

Next I stripped off about 3 inches of the blue jacket of the opposite end of the cable.

I then untwisted the pairs so that I could split them between the 2 jacks.

I used sections of the jacket that I stripped off to separate the 2 bundles.

After they were separated, I just followed my diagram to attach the RJ-11 for telephone and RJ-45 for ethernet to the separated bundles .

And here is the finished product ready for its twin to be made.

Once the first one was complete is was a snap to build the second one.

Now I can use any patch cable between these 2 "dongles" and pass both telephone and ethernet where ever it may be needed.

Hope some of you may find this useful in the future.

I've thought of doing this so many times. Excellent guide. +rep

nicely done! I've always found it funny how they wasted the extra pairs. seen plenty of people make double ethernet cables from a single cable. great tut!

I have a friend who turned some of his extra cat5 into a USB chord

awesome idea, love it! :up:

Sweet idea.

IIRC, those 'unused' pairs are only unused if you have 10/100Mbps ethernet, and you'll have to remove the splitters if you decide to later go to 1Gbps or higher.

Quote:

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You only need all 4 pairs of wires if you are running gigabit network switches.

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> http://forums.pcworld.co.nz/archive/...p/t-59910.html

However, if you're gonna be sticking to 10/100 for the forseeable future, way to use all that spare cable. :D

POE often uses all 8 wires also. :)

But again, great tut!

depending on the Phone, and network equipt... Some times this will cause problems with 100mb networks two. Causes the switch and nic to think they should be running @ 10mb. You can also hear a slight "static" in the back ground on the phone again, this really depends on the phone (how well you hear and your phone service quality... were I grew up we would have never noticed.. of course we also heard the neighbors conversation on the lines too :) ), heck even the weather will make it better or worse
I've also used this method for those places I need an extra jack but can't justify running a whole new cable... like for an extra printer... not used allot not high traffic.. a little noise on the line will not hurt anything :) works like a champ!

Nice post Over!

Now days Most tech guys suggest to use at least Cat5e as it widely used by most of Phone Service Providers. Even people use Cat6 for future proof investment and Gigabit internet. Cat5e works good if distance b/w modem and compute not more than 100ft. For longer distance cat6 will serve better.