Removing uncited material for readability...

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Wayne Johnson wrote:
> There is two classes of wire.  Cat3 has 4 wires (2 pair) and is used for
> most phone wiring.  Of these wires, there are two ways to wire it.  In
> RJ11, only the red and green carry the phone signals and the yellow and
> black remain unused.  This is typical for most house wiring.  RJ13
> extends RJ11 by placing a second phone line on the yellow/black pair. 
> You can get RJ13 phones and splitters at Radio Shack.  Cat3 can not be
> used for LAN wiring.  To connect cat3 wire, you can use a punchdown
> terminal block, or there are small button sized "wire nuts".  Keep the
> amount of wire outside the sheath to a minimum to reduce noise.  Cat3
> wire, modular RJ11/13 & RJ45 sockets, and just about anything else can
> be found at Home Depot.

 Cat3 is a wire specification, not a hard-and-fast identifier for how many 
wires are in a plastic wrapper.  There's 2-pair, 4-pair, and heck, even 
25-pair (with probably a few stops in-between).  I've spent a lot of time 
throughout the last week backpulling old phone/network cable, a lot of 
which was 4-pair Cat3.

> Cat5[e] wire is used for LAN, specifically 10baseT.  This wire has 4
> twisted pair wires.  Cat5 can be used to carry phone signals, just be
> very sure that you don't connect a phone line to a lan card :{(>  I
> would recommend that if your using cat5 cable for phone, that you put
> RJ11/13 sockets in.  RJ45 (LAN) plugs won't fit into an RJ11/13 socket. 
> If you decide to use the run for LAN later, change the plug.  You need
> to keep the amount of exposed wire on LAN wiring to less than 1/2" (for
> 100BaseT). Most LAN specs also require no more than 4 socket/plug pairs
> per run.  No this plugs into that, which plugs into this.

 I've actually found some modular wall outlet components that work great 
with RJ-45, RJ-11, and possibly RJ-13, although the outlets are 
technically RJ-45.  (I suspect they have RJ-11/13 modules, but 
unfortunately I had to order the materials before they'd picked out a 
phone system, so I erred on the side of having more wires than I needed 
available.)  The stuff I'm using is from Allen Tel, their Versatap product 
line.  I'm sure other manufacturers have similar products.
 Of course, if you go this route, be sure to label everything to avoid any 
mishaps.  I color-coded the outlets in my case (white is phone, blue is 
network, orange is don't-you-dare-plug-anything-into-this).
 Graybar (http://www.graybar.com) has been a pretty good supplier for me.  
They have a few locations in town.

     Jima