Wiring up the house

[dR.Jester]

I am in the process of wiring up my house with CAT5e and using RJ45 keystone jacks. Today I had a DSL tech tell me that I could only use white orange / orange and still get full use of my ethernet connection. I have never heard of this before. I planned and still intend on using all pairs but this has me curious.

Has anyone ever heard of just using those two pairs and still getting full use? It makes no sense to me...

 

[brom42]

The guy doesn't know what he is talking about.

10/100 Ethernet uses 2 of the 4 pairs. It uses pins 1,2,3,6 or the green and orange pairs. DSL/POTs phones uses 1 pair on pins 4,5. Which is the blue pair. Copper Gigabit uses all 4 pairs.

The only reason I could see him mentioning the orange/white orange pair is that it is the second pair in a 25-pair phone cable, so the white green/green would be your incoming line and if you were running DSL internally, it would go on the white orange/orange pair. I have to wire both phone and internet to the houses on campus and that is how we get everything to them. 1st pair gets voice, second pair gets 100mb/50mb VDSL.

 

[Zangmonkey]

Like the previous poster said: you can do 10/00 using only two pairs

But if you *can* run a wire then you should, with all 4 pairs dedicated. Wire is so cheap it isn't worth hacking anything.

Especially if you are in a situation where it's easy to run wires (like the drywall is down or something).
Hell, I would run three wires and just leave the extras coiled in the walls.