atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring "Split" CAT5 wire - 2 pair data / 1 pair telco?

upstateny is right on the button.i have a client its a hotel when they built it they only ran cat5e
for network and forgot for phones so i use w/br pair for analog set never had any issues

when I was using it here it worked fine for surfing the , net printing was slow so I substituted a switchlet .

now I was just using it for two data drops no phone

there are two types of Gigabit, 1000Base-T and TX. the T uses all 4 pairs and the TX uses just two, but requires CAT6 cable. I am not sure how they are doing POE on 1000BaseT unless they are just mulitplexing the data over the power.

Many here are claiming that 100mb cannot be achieved on just 2 pairs, while in fact that’s all that is required. To prove the point, companies have gotten so cheap that many of the factory made patch cords that come with the low end routers consist of only 2 pair now. Pins1,2 and 3,6 that all folks. Now whether this is good practice is another issue, but as far as throughput is concerned 100mb all the way. Gigabit is another story.

100Mb on 2 pairs is 10/100 specs. Above is 1 Gigb. That requires a FULL 4 pair or fiber.

You can't get another cable run?

I recently had a "frugal " customer building a new building , all drops in conduit in the slab and they where looking to run 1/2" conduit because the architect said that one cat5e cable could be used both voice and data

I wanted 1" for future but got 3/4 for separate cables

false economy in my opinion

Absolutely... i would never do this in a new install .... but in an existing building that is tough to run cable i don't have a problem explaining to the customer that this isn't the correct way to do it but it may very well work just fine for them and if they are ok with it we'll give it a shot.

I can't imagine an architect making that call ..... usually they put twice as many drops as needed!

Most architects I know are voice and data experts… not.

At UT we had a bunch of existing data wiring that was done in the early 90s...they ran one cat 5 cable for 2 jacks, one jack with the blue/orange pairs, one jack with the green/brown pairs, punched down to Krone blocks, which were then cross-connected to a 66 block with 25 pair cable, which fed to a 10BaseT patch panel in the data rack.
Needless to say these runs are all abandoned in place now.