I had to replace a jack for the phone on the wall yesterday because my wife likes to pull on things. I bought a unit from our local junk store and when I installed it, I noticed it has 2 extra wires and thus could support all 6 lanes in the plug, if I had them.
These extra wires are white and blue. What would be the most common use for these extra wires?
Jamie
Blue & blue/white is line 1 Orange & orange/white is line 2 Green & green/white is line 3 Brown & brown/white is line 4
Some ppl. with a 'whole house" DSL filter will put the unfilered voice on blue - blue/white, then the filtered DSL goes on orange - orange/white. That way they don't need to rewire every jack in the house. The extra two pair are for extra phone or DSL lines.
That would probably be an RJ25 configuration - same 6-pin modular connector as RJ11 (two conductors) and RJ14 (four conductors).
The blue and white wires would normally be used to support a third phone line - "tip" on white and "ring" on blue.
I haven't seen a lot of three-line phones, but I imagine that they are probably still available (mostly marketed to SOHO sorts of customers?).
Strangling your wife.
The white and blue really ought to be the innermost pair. Up to recently phone jacks typically contained three pairs, while data jacks contained four pairs. (Nowadays everyone seems to just install data jacks.) Many of my clients used the third pair for a modem, back in the day.
Forgot to insert the smiley. :)
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