Is it frequent to use two Ethernet cables for one phone line

installationnoisetelephone

I'm experiencing some noise on my phone when it is connected in the wall. There's no noise when connected right in the modem. So I decided to check things out and I noticed something that seems odd to me. My telephone jack uses 2, yes two, Ethernet Cat 5 cables.

Telephone Plug
(source: max-worlds.net)

As you can see, both blue wires are connected to red wire on the telephone jack and both white/blue wires are connected to the green wire. It seems like an odd setup to me. This is a new house. On a side note, I'm thinking they could have done that to allow an Ethernet network, but we already have a Cat 6 network going on…

So I'm wondering if this is a frequent practice, a recommended approach or a bad job.

Best Answer

Probably you have two or more phone jacks daisy-chained together. One cable goes to wherever the phone line enters the house and the other runs to another phone jack somewhere else in the house.

This is a common practice. I did some pricing online, and it seems that Cat 5e is comparable in price to 4-conductor phone cable, so the builders may simply have used it because they had it to hand.