Hooking up phone line to patch panels

[Osprey]

Andrew ... did you then effectively use 2,3 & 5 through to all outlets ? if so what LAU type did you use ?

[Andrew Gabriel]

I did my house first, and then my parents' house, and I did them slightly differently.

In my house, I sent both lines down each cat 5e to the RJ45 outlet. I routed 2&5, 3&4 down two pairs, so the two lines used all 4 pairs.

I looked at a number of different commercial LAU's we had at work, and every make had a different mapping of cat 5 lines to the phone lines, so I realised there is no standard mapping. There were none which routed two BT lines down a single cat 5e, so I decided to make my own.

I bought some 3-way and 4-way BT adaptors, carefully cut the BT plug off the adaptor and found an RJ45 plug fitted almost exactly onto the same plastic stub. I rewired the adaptors with the top sockets on one line and the bottom sockets on the other line. For ground zero, I made up patch leads with two BT flying plugs connected into an RJ45 plug, so I can feed both NTE's down each cat 5e (although I don't have to plug both in, if I don't want my work line going to the bedroom, say. A real 4-way adaptor is plugged into each NTE so phone outlets can be routed to up to 4 rooms.

This scheme works well. The only drawback is that because the bell wire is not properly twisted with 2&5, some break-through of the ring signal can be heard on the other line.

Next I did my parents' house. They only have one phone line. For that, I used dual data sockets where one is an RJ45 and the other is a BT. I used ones from CPC where the sockets can be popped out from the back of the faceplate and swapped for the other type. (They aren't available separately, but I bought some spares from which I can steal any extras needed.) Each double outlet is fed with 2 cat 5e's from the ground zero patch panel, so they can be swapped for 2 RJ45 if required. I fed the phone down the 2 pairs which 100baseT doesn't use, so nothing nasty happens if the wrong ones are plugged together.