Hack your House: Run both ethernet and phone over existing Cat-5 cable

Step 10 Solder phone and Cat 5 together

Strip and solder the red phone wire to the striped brown Cat 5 wire, and the green phone wire to the sold brown Cat 5 wire.

• I found it helpful to only strip the two wires I was going to solder together, to avoid mix-ups.

Tape the two wires separately to avoid shorting them together. Neither you nor the phone company would appreciate this. Tape the entire custom connection to the Cat 5 cable so that it appears nice and neat.

Comments

[shtihl]

if you wanted to avoid soldering, you could pick up a set of Telephone Wire Splice Connectors which are located in the same section of the big box hardware store (starts with HD) as the other parts you will buy for this DIY. they are red and allow you to crimp two wires into one by simply squeezing the splicer with a pair of pliers or the needlenose on your multi-tool

[cowen]

You CAN NOT use this on DATA. To use this on a data cable these untwist the cable. From the above discussion about the need for twisting of the pairs these splices are designed not to work. It is not IF you will have a failure it is when.

[pcooper2]

You CAN use these crimp splices on DATA. Make sure the pigtails are kept as short as practical. The pigtails are an impedance discontinuity in the cable, but as long as one has very few of them and the size of the discontinuity is kept small, most systems have enough tolerance in them to still be able to work reliably.

[T3Hprogrammer]

The method described in the instructable does not modify the twisted nature of the ethernet wires (I was very careful about that.) Be sure that if you use another method (such as these splices) that you leave the data wires twisted up until 1/2" from each termination.