atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Installing RJ45 data jacks for voice

Made a service call last week involving a problem reported that a printer, postage machine, fax, and POS Terminal at the same wallplate were not working. I found that some one had plugged the postage machine, fax, and POS Terminal into the ca5 data jack (using a splitter)and the printer into the 8 pin voice jack (because it fit). I replaced the 8 pin voice jack with 3 - 6 pin jacks, one for each of the devices. This experience conviced me to not use cat5e or cat6 jacks for voice even if the customer wants cat5 or 6 cable for voice as well as data. On another job currently in progress, the customer agreed with my suggestion to use 6 pin jacks for the voice cables even though all the cable was cat6. I did not try to talk him out of using cat6 for voice as the IT guy had suggested that all cat 6 be used.

Probably nothing at all. Since the ringing will occur on pins 4,5 of the NIC, which are pretty much dead (dummy) contacts anyway. Should it cause damage, more than likely you can replace the card with another. Usually a 10 dollar fix not including the labor.

That may be true. But consider the "down time" of the PC & you know WHO will be blamed for the snafu and it won't be their CG.

If I was ever to take the new "Standard" route, at the very least, the client would be signing a waiver ahead of time to cover MY butt.

Apart from perhaps not damaging the PC, a certain employee had to deal with not getting faxed orders and not being able to print to that printer and a lot of was time spent trying to figure out what was wrong before calling me, and they had to move heavy furniture around to get at the wallplate and then my service call charge. All that could have been avoided by using 6 pin jacks for the telco equipment in the first place. I am convinced that is the way to do it.

Gigabit ethernet is the norm now for most newer equipment, and it uses all four pairs. How well the ASIC line drivers ("protected" by 1/16th watt pull-down resistors) can handle 90VAC I honestly don't know, but I'd rather not find out the hard way, especially on an integrated (on-the-motherboard) NIC.

Jim
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Speaking from a secure undisclosed location.

I was in the computer repair business for a few years. My experience has been that people have just as much of a problem with plugging their 6p silver satin modem cable into the PC Ethernet jack as they do using the wrong jack in a faceplate. Every computer that I saw with a 10/100 NIC has pins 4 and 5 shorted. I would occasionally get a call that someone took their computer back home after I repaired it and then their phones quit working. Since pins 4 and 5 are shorted, I never had a blown NIC after someone did this.

1000base-T NICs are probably a different story. I got out of the business before those became common.

-Nelson

So are you terminating everything on patch panels, then (I hope your answer is "no"), or are you putting "voice" cables on 110 blocks instead of 66 blocks? We all have seen the discussion of how using Cat 5 for voice has no benefit, and it's a pain to terminate on 66 blocks.

Justin

Ed, the RJ45C is a surface mount. The RJ45W is a wall mount. (For wall-mount computers)

Sheesh...didn't you know that?

Wall mount computer ... Isn't that what you'd call a VoIP phone? :dance:

OR maybe, an alarm central control?