help in wiring jack

In changing the telephone jack receptacle from the original (25 year old) beige one to a new white one, I find that the new jack is not the same layout as the old jack.

This particular jack was wired differently from all other jacks in the house. Evidently, the installer ran out of regular colors and used odd colors.

The four wires in the wall are: orange w/white band, white w/orange band, green, and white w/green band. They need to connect to the new jack with green, yellow, black, and red.

How do I determine which colors to match?

I can't compare it to another jack because no other jack in the house has these color wires.

Replies to this newsgroup or to tony snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com . Any would be appreciated.

Tony Cooper posted on that vast internet thingie:

Polarity is all but irrelevant in this day and age. The orange pair should be one phone line and the green pair should be a second phone line. One pair goes to red and green the other goes to yeller and black.

Steve at SELLCOM

You only need two wires per line. If the jack is for one line, find the two that are similar and see if they have dial tone. These will be wired to green/red of the jack. If you need two lines, the other two will also have dial tone, these go to yellow/black. If you can't tell which is which, call the two numbers. One will ring, the other will be busy.

Brad Houser

Thank you for your replies. As it turns out, the line is now working. The cure was not following the instructions or the diagrams on the web, but plain old "try this, try that". The installer did not follow the procedures, and evidently just used whatever wire came to hand. I made the mistake of trying to follow the diagrams at Ablecom.info and do it "right". I should have written down what worked, but I finally got a dial tone I just slammed it back and wall and went on to something else.

If you have time to fix it right, each line should be on a proper PAIR of wires, ie., don't put a line on an orange and a green wire, use the orange/white and white/orange for one line, etc.

If you don't keep the wires in pairs, the amount of noise and cross-talk between lines will be higher.

This would mean fixing it at both ends, of course :(

-- Gary Breuckman

But that diagram didn't tell him which of the solid colors go where.

Wht/blue = tip 1 = green

Blue/wht = ring 1 = red

Wht/orange = tip 2 = black

orange/wht = ring 2 = yellow

wht/green = tip 3 = white

green/wht = ring 3 = blue

Check the diagram(s) again. Note in the lower right there is one showing the *proper* relationship to band-stripe for the solid colors he asked for.

But if you read the entire thread, you'll find out that the person who wired the OP up did it willy-nilly and the only way the OP got it to work was trial and error anyway.