Pandemonium Medicine Show

The telephone wiring inside our house is mostly CAT-3, Blue-Orange-Green coloured pairs, one solid coloured and the other striped with white. The "normal" way that this is used is that the first line is on the blue wires, the second on the orange and the third on the green pair. Traditional telephone wiring uses red, green, black and yellow wires. The first line uses the red and green wires and the second line uses the yellow and black wires. The phone company wiring which comes to the house uses the traditional wiring colours.

When it came time to connect all of the telephone jacks in our house the person who wired it must have been baffled. Blue? Orange? Green? These don't match the wires from the phone company! Hmmmm. Maybe I will just match the closest colours. So rather than placing line one on the blue pair, they instead tied red to solid orange and green to solid green and proceeded to wire almost the whole house this way. Lastly, there are nine separate wire runs in the house to the fourteen telephone jacks. All of these were tied together with the phone company wire using a single screw on cap.

Since that original hookup job many changes have been made to the telephone service have been performed. Additional wall jacks were added, additional lines, a brief experiment with digital over-cable telephone service was conducted, a security system was added, etc. Some of the service providers recognized the "creative" wiring pattern and as they added lines or jacks either attempted to "fit in" or to isolate their work from the mess. Two of the new cable runs simply grafted themselves onto the phone company wiring before the big bundle but used the correct "standard" wiring pattern.

Back to last week. I needed to figure out which of the nine wire runs was used by the fax machine so that I could connect it to the correct pair from the phone company. Sadly after playing around in the phone box for 20 minutes I couldn't make sense of it at all.

I had six lines coming in from vphone company service. Three were from the traditional phone company service and three from the defunct digital cable telephone service. The digital cable lines were still connected in the phone box even though the service has been gone for a year. They took back their magic interface box so I presumed that the other end is not connected to anything. I decided that the only way I was going to figure out what needed to be done was to simplify the situation--I needed to remove the digital cable service wiring from the phone box. Whichever pair was left from the inside wiring would be the fax line.

So I disconnected the three pairs I believed to be the digital cable phone service and crawled under the house to pull that wiring out of the phone box. A little tugging and one good yank later and the useless cable from the digital cable service was now completely disconnected. I crawled back out from under the house to ponder my next step.

Surveying the phone box I noticed something was wrong. One of the large bundles which ganged all of the inside wiring together was partially torn apart and several of the leads were no longer screwed into the cap. Eeek! I had not properly disconnected the the digital cable wiring and my tugging and yanking from under the house had pulled out some of the wrong wires. I set to repairing the damage.

Remember how I mentioned that some of the service providers had tried to do the right think when they added additional inside wiring by using the normal wiring pattern? Unfortunately, some of the confusing and non-standard wiring was impacted by "the yank" and I could no longer tell which cables used which wiring pattern. My only recourse was to reconnect everything and rewire every inside jack.

This has proved to be a most unpleasant experience. I ended up spending about six hours in the dusty crawlspace under the house labelling the wiring runs and connecting them to the new punchdown panel I bought. I've also spent considerable time rewiring individual inside jacks, more of which I seem to find every day.

I wonder at why home telecoms wiring is so difficult. Am I just ignorant and/or have unrealistic expectations? Every time I have to do some rewiring it always turns into a far larger job than I expected and includes a multiplicity of tiny frustrations. Wall plates and their use of "regular" straight screws. Gah! What will it take to get them to switch to phillips or robertson screws? When wiring inside jacks, how about connecting all the wires when you first install the jack rather than require it be re-opened in the future? I've also petitioned the pope to grant an indulgence to those who take the trouble to label their work. Expect your reward soon.

It is now a week since this experiment began. I have been able to restore most of our phone service, though at the cost of considerable sanity. There are still two inside wiring runs I have been unable to connect. One runs to the security system and when connected bridges two of the phone lines and disrupts DSL service. The other problem cable causes one of the phone lines to go permanently off-hook and the other line to show reverse polarity on my little phone tester box. I'm sure I'll resolve both at some point, even if it involves burning the house down to start from scratch....