Fax and Cat5e

fluiduk

fluiduk

fluiduk

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Joined
13 Nov 2003
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1,567
Location
Manchester
Hi All

We are having a massive reshuffle at work and installing cat5e wiring throughout.

All our voice and fax and adsl lines come in upstairs. As far as data and voice is concerned that is fine. But the fax machine needs to moved downstairs.

My question is, can I patch the fax line through our patch panel and down to a network point downstairs and use a rj45 to rj11 adapter to plug the fax into the outlet.
If so, what is the best way to wire it.

I was thinking of wiring a length of cat5 into the patch panel on one end, and an standard phone plug on the other and sticking it into the master phone socket which is upstairs in the same room as the rack and patch panel. Then via the patch panel, patch that port down to the network outlet downstairs.

What wiring convention would be best for this.

Thanks in advance
Aaron
 
I beleive you can, and can get adaptors for this purpose, as long as it isn't going through any switches etc ;)
 
fluiduk said:
The only thing i am unsure of is what order the colours need to be in.
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Any you like, really. There might be a standard convention for patching phone extensions through an RJ45 patch panel, but a fax machine should only require 1 pair to function.
 
Any idea what pair it has to be? I guess if I connect all 4 and use the same colour convetion throughtout it wont really matter

Aaron
 
you can connect them how ever you like as long as you stick to that order all the way through at the end of the day theyre just wires
 
blitz2163 said:
you can connect them how ever you like as long as you stick to that order all the way through at the end of the day theyre just wires
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They're pairs of wires though. The twisted nature of the pairs helps counteract induction and crosstalk effects. If you just did as you said with CAT5 cabling for use in 10/100BaseTX networking, you might have problems over larger distances. It requires 2 pairs, but the 2 pairs are at pins 1+2 and 3+6, which you wouldn't get by just making up the order.
 
fluiduk said:
The distance is about 20 metres. Do you think that will be ok?
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Thinking about it, if you're just going to patch it through so that one RJ45 socket plugs into the phone line and the other plugs into the fax machine, then just wire it up as normal and use two RJ45->RJ11 adapters. They will more likely than not be designed for standard cabling installations.

EDIT1: Bah, re-read the OP again. If you take the front off the master socket, you can add phone extensions. Take your CAT 5 cable from the patch panel, and connect up the relavent pair to pins 2 and 3 (i think). If you're not sure which pair it is (i'm not!), then try it. You'll only have to do it four times!

EDIT2: Thinking about it more logically, and RJ11 cable that's only wired for voice uses the middle two of the 4 pins. I would guess that the RJ45-RJ11 adapter would use the middle 4 of the 8 pins. That would leave the middle pair of the RJ45 wiring for voice, which is usually the blue pair iirc. So try that.
 
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First, in the location you're going to put the fax, you wire in (or use an existing) RJ45 socket. Then plug an RJ45->RJ11 adapter in, and plug in your fax machine.

Then run some CAT5 from the patch panel to the master socket for the phone. Connect the blue pair from the CAT5 as a phone extension - for a fairly standard NTE5 BT Socket, it's done like this (only blue is needed):

http://www.adslnation.com/support/extensions.php

Should work.
 
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