Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations wOOdy-Soft on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

rj11c or rj14c

Status
Not open for further replies.

fonehome

Vendor
Jun 8, 2003
12
US
I have to install a phone system that uses 1 pair wiring...
can I use a 6 pin jack instead of a 4 pin jack???

what happens to the unused pins in the jack???
 
yes you can use 6 pin jack

the extra 4 pair arent used
 
Might as well check the cost. Not many syatems out there use 6 conductor cables. Either 2, 4, or 8. You might want to just use Cat5 and terminate everything on Cat5 jacks. With the way everything is going, VoIP is coming.
 
You should get and use the standard for the jack you plan to use. It's not required and will work if you don't but it wi;; save you headaches in the future if you ever change the system. (like install or upgrade to a system thet uses two pair)
 
fonehome, what type of system?

In my experience... we always wired RJ14 with the inner pair being blue, and the outer pair being orange -- wrapped the green and brown back onto the cable sheath, and terminated it on an 8 pin category 3 jack. From there we used standard 4 pin patch cords, which will fit into an 8 pin jack. That way... if we ever needed anything with more pins, we could punch those extra pairs down, or if we needed to split the green and brown to a second jack to get two jacks out of the cable -- we could do that too.

6 pin will work as well, although somewhat random.
 
i heard that you cannot use a 4 pin line cord into an 8 pin jack because the outer pair of pins won't make contact...
 
You can use it in the jack, they sometimes need to be unpluged a repluged to make proper connection.

Good Luck!!
 
Executone is on the money. They sometimes need to be wiggled a bit, but I've never had a real problem.

For cat-3 voice jacks @ 8pin, I've always used ICC jacks. Super cheap, keystone compatible, and they seem to fit well.

What type of phone system are you using?

Older Avaya/Lucent phones will work with 8 pin patch cords, newer Merlin and Definity sets (excluding the ISDN sets, which aren't really new...) will use up to a six pin patch cord. All partner sets (to my knowledge) can use an 8 pin cord, as well as the older ISDN sets or I believe MLX sets in the case of a Merlin system.

Correct me if I'm wrong on that...

I think the move from 8 to 6 pin jacks on the phones themselves was due to data networking becoming more and more prominent, so they were trying to de-confuse end users who may have accidentally plugged their phone into a network jack, although I know that most cabling contractors always wire to 8 pin, and for that matter -- most all of them wire to cat 5 or 6 now, so what's the difference.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top