telephone wires colour coding

help required regarding new telephone colour coding ( domestic), I have the old wires ie. blue, orange etc. how do these marry up with the new colours.
Cheers :

Load of info here

info is availible but you should NEVER trust it. color codes are not always followed for a variety of reasons (ignorance, damaged cables and running multiple lines down the same cable are the most obvious ones)

if you are adding sockets the important thing is to make sure that you connect the right pins on the old socket to the right pins on the new socket. Ignore the colors of the existing wiring.

normally the the only two wires will be White\blue Blue\White
You only need these two wries...
the code is:

W\BL
W\O
W\G
W\Br

And so on... not go through them all...

If your wiring a new socket from an old one then you only need connect accross the same two wires on your original socket! But make sure your new socket has a capacitor in it...othwise it won't ring... The old way needed a bell shunt but now its not needed as no one uses puld dial phones, do they!

Darren

I thought that was generally you need to connect three wires,

9 times out of ten,the line will be on orange/blue on old type wiring which consisted of orange/blue green and brown.a little way to test is to strip a little insulation of the ends of 2 wires and rub them on a pair of cutters the metal bit of course and you should see some tiny little sparks dont worry this voltage wont even give you a hard-on, the 2 that spark are your line.the new 6wire type the line will be on white/blue which is the a-leg and blue/white which is the b-leg.And the first socket/line jack that connects to the line must have a capacitor in it, a yellow looking tube thing.Unless you have an NTE5a type socket,in which case you will need to terminate wires on the little plate that remove from the front of the NTE5a,otherwise you will not receive any calls cause it wont ring.The wires normally go in 2(blue/white) and 5 (white/blue)on a socket,and orange/white in 3 to make it ring.Bit long winded but hopr it helps.

hotncold said:

help required regarding new telephone colour coding ( domestic), I have the old wires ie. blue, orange etc. how do these marry up with the new colours.

Click to expand...

This is not a sensible question to ask because you should not need to know the answer, even if there was a reliable answer.

What are you trying to do? Wire up an extension socket?

If you have a main phone socket then it will either be a modern Linebox, or an old-style Master socket.

You can tell which one you have because a Linebox will have a horizonal line across the front of it between the two parts and the socket will be lower than the centre of the box, whereas a Master socket will have no line across it and the socket will be dead centre in the front plate.

If you have a Linebox, you wire extensions by connecting terminals 2, 3, and 5 in parallel between the terminals on the back of the Linebox lower front plate, and the terminals in the extension socket(s). (You might as well wire up terminal 4 because otherwise you'll have a spare end flapping round.) You are allowed to take the lower front plate off the Linebox, thereby disconnecting your premise wiring from the telco's (BT's) system. However you aren't supposed to take the entire front off, because this would expose the "live" telephone circuit (about 48V DC when quiescent or about 80V AC when ringing).

If you have a Master socket, you must use a wiring adaptor (a little thing with a plug on one side, a socket on the other, and a bit of cable coming out the bottom), and wire the extension socket according to the wiring adaptor's instructions. You're not supposed to take the front off the master socket, because this would expose the "live" telephone circuit. If you want to wire further extensions, you just wire them in parallel with the first extension.

If you don't have either a Linebox or a Master socket then forget it; you need to phone your telephone company (BT) and get them to put in a phone socket, which nowadays will be a Linebox.

Terminal 4 is not used on domestic installations and you only need to connect terminals 2, 3 and 5, but the conductors in telephone cable come in pairs and wiring up terminal 4 keeps the spare fourth conductor tidy.

If you are going to wire both ends of a bit of standard cable, and therefore get to choose the mapping between colours and terminals, then you should use the standard mapping:

terminal 2 : blue/white
terminal 3 : orange/white
terminal 4 : white/orange
terminal 5 : white/blue

Ultimately, you could use any colour for any terminal, as long as it connects the same numbered terminals together, but if you have standard cable you might as well use the standard mapping because it causes the least confusion and work for anyone else who comes along later.

Wiring information here:

http://www.telephonesuk.co.uk/wiring_info.htm

Please someone help me i have a 4 bit old phone line coming in and I need to fix it to a new 6 bit one and I don't know what colours go together

What are you actually trying to connect together?

Although this thread (of 7 posts prior to today) is admittedly over 8 years old, I'm rather amazed to see that it has had in excess of 22,000 views!

Kind Regards, John