Can Cat 5 cable be used for telephone lines?

RU482

Lifer
Apr 9, 2000
12,689
3
81
assuming you terminated it correctly, could you use the 4 twisted pairs in Cat5 cable to cary signal for 4 telephone lines? Would the "twisting" of the wires mess up the analog signal?
 

Hotdog

Member
Sep 6, 2001
28
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Yes there is no problem using CAT 5 cable, in fact as technology increases many of us without it in our houses may have to upgrade our old wiring. If I was building a house right now that would definately be my choice. I wouldn't split one cable to run other phones though.
 

TheCorm

Diamond Member
Nov 5, 2000
4,326
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Yeah, just think of it as using thicker, high quality speaker cable to replace the standard cable you get with your stereo :)

Corm
 

compudog

Diamond Member
Apr 25, 2001
5,782
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71
Cat 5 works fine. I have two two-line phones and rather than running a separate line for each I ran 1 CAT 5 to each 2 line phone from the box in the basement. I have not noticed any problems with noise.
 

SocrPlyr

Golden Member
Oct 9, 1999
1,513
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a neighbor of mine does electrical/phone work and when we were finishing our basement we asked him to do the job for us... but while he was at it i asked him to run some cat5 from the office upstairs (roadrunner cable modem) to the newly finished basement... and he was like ok i'll check into what kind of cable i need to get and the cost (which we had already given it to him) anyways he comes back to us the next day and was like this is the stuff that i am going to use for the phone line i am putting in down there anyways... so basically he always uses cat5 as a contractor... i just thought that was neat...

Josh
 

Mday

Lifer
Oct 14, 1999
18,647
1
81
cat5 will work fine as telephone cabling. of course cat3 which also has 8 wires will also work fine, i mean, cat3 = cheaper.

rj45 is a telco plug.

cat5 refers to the type of twisted pair =P.
 

ZZZZZZ

Platinum Member
Nov 11, 1999
2,190
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Actually, RJ-11 is standard Telco plug. RJ-45 is Standard Data communications Plug;)