Red, Right Ring!

When your wiring up a phone jack there is a proper way to do it. If you are using a traditional 4 wire cable (quad wire is what I call it) that means there are 4 wires in the cable.  Those 4 wires create 2 pairs.

Pair one is red and green.
Pair 2 is black and yellow.

Each pair has a tip and ring side.

Pair 1 - red is ring and green is tip
Pair 2 - yellow is ring and black is tip

This picture might be a little hard to see but the ring side always goes on the right side of the protector (demarcation point). This is an industry standard, so that all technicians follow the same rules and color codes.  Any color will work if it is same on both sides, but this way you can assume that when your fixing a jack it is right on the other end.  When people start mixing up colors it gets really hard to fix anything! Remember "ring right red" it always works.



So always use pair 1 when hooking up a phone jack. Pair 2 can be used if you are having a second phone line.



Below is a picture of a quad wire and a cat5 cable.  We already talked about the quad wire and the cat5 is very similar.

Here is a picture of how a cat5 cable and how it is broken down.