help in wiring jack

Comprehensive answer:

(diagram near the bottom of the page)

Short answer:

Normally, the colors you should see in the wall are the orange/white pair and the blue/white pair. The green/white pair is usually Line 3.

The wires should be paired, so that orange with white stripes goes with white with orange stripes, and so forth. You have to figure out (or decide) which of these pairs is Line 1 and which is Line 2 for purposes of your jack.

LINE 1: red wire mostly colored (white stripes) green wire mostly white (colored stripes)

LINE 2: yellow wire mostly colored (white stripes) black wire mostly white (colored stripes)

In the phone plug itself, Line 1 is the middle-most pair, and then Line

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.