data-wiringelectricalphone-wiring
I popped off a wall jack for one of the phone connections in my house because I was curious to see if it was using cat5 that I could use to change some of them to rj45 for ethernet instead and got what seems to be 2 cat5 cables. (Green and brown cables have been folded back and taped to the wires)
I'm interested if anyone knows why there would be 2 of these cables hooked up because anything I've found online with these jacks has just been 1 cable.
If you are running telephone and ethernet on the same cable then it is most likely interference from the telephone pair. POTS (Plain Old Telephone Sockets) have a constant voltage of 50V and ring at 75V with an engaged voltage of 35V.
It will not be the electrical 110V causing interference because your switch cancels the noise out because it if grounded(negative) to your home installation(on which your switch runs and knows about this frequency so it can eliminate is successfully).
Why will it pick up noise from the telephone voltage? Because the power is coming from outside your house on a separate ground loop that has a unique frequency resonance which is not the same as your houses' frequency(not talking about 50hz/60hz - But electromagnetic radiation). This will cause the switch to suffer packet loss because it cannot successfully XOR noise that is generated from the phone lines voltage frequency.
To solve this problem in order of cheapest to most expensive:
Please Note:
Some distribution boxes have a lightning protector or surge protector installed that link in the actual earth(also called ground) but earth is used in UK, Some parts of EU and ZA(not sure about USA) to detect appliance fault and gives lightning a short path to the earth. Usually the earth bar is connected to a rod that goes into the ground outside the house or bound to the incoming phase shield which is earthed at the main power box. When I talk about ground I mean the actual negative(-) wire of an appliance or analog / digital circuit.
NEVER TRY TO GROUND(NEGATIVE) THE TELEPHONE TO YOUR HOME GROUND OR A GROUND LOOP ISOLATOR
As it seems the OP grounded his telephone but it is most likely earthing the cable not actual negative.
Doing this can cause damage to the telephone network costing you thousands dollars and/or cause death or serious bodily injury from electrical shock. Remember that the ground of your home has a different impedance than ground from the telephone network and can result in 110V electrical shock! That is why it is illegal to rewire telephone sockets in many countries. For your own safety.
Since they went to the trouble to wire a pair of CAT-5 cables at each receptacle, they likely wired them all back to a central patch panel in a closet or wall cabinet that looks something like this:
If that's the case, then none of the outlets are "live" and would need to be patched over to the appropriate service (data or phone). Unless they are patched to something, then they are not live. How to actually patch to phone or data varies depending on how the phone and internet service are wired to the wiring closet.
If they really just left the other ends dangling and unterminated, the best thing to do would be to terminate the to a patch panel like the one pictured (which is surprisingly easy with the right punch down tool)
If the jacks/wires are not labeled, you can trace (and test) them with a cable tester like this:
http://www.kleintools.com/catalog/cable-testers-accessories/vdv-scout-pro-tester-kit
this is just one example of a cable tester - there are lots of cable testers out there of varying quality, but this is moderately priced and works well for home use. There are cheaper testers that just use an array of LED's to show you the cable status, and there are (much) more expensive testers that will do a full cable qualification to certify that it will run at the rated speed. I've used this model and it works well for home use, one nice feature it has for cable tracing multiple cables is that it has several numbered terminators that you can plug into one end, then when you plug the meter into the other end, it will tell you which one it sees
Best Answer
There are multiple wires on the socket because it is a wired continuation on to the next RJ11 jack in another part of the house. In fact if you locate all the phone jacks in your house you will likely find them all connected together. The reason for this is because the wire set is capable of allowing for a landline phone to be moved from room to room OR for multiple phone sets to be installed.
You would not want to use this wiring for an Ethernet type connection. For that you will need to pull new cables from each location where you want to have an RJ45 back to a central location where you would locate a network hub or switch. The ease or difficulty of getting the new wiring in place will depend a lot on how your house is constructed and to some degree on the locations that you intend to locate the RJ45 jacks.