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- ***************************************************************************
- * *
- * The Telephone Works *
- * Egghead Dude *
- * CHiNA CHiNA *
- ***************************************************************************
-
- Welcome to CHiNA Educational InfoFile Series II, # 3. Once again,
- be looking for new files weekly for the next few weeks until school starts
- again. And contrary to Megaton Man's belief, we are still very much alive
- and in production. If he tells you otherwise, kindly call him a peasant
- and tell him to fuck himself...if you want. Enjoy!
-
-
- Here are the standards in Telephone Color Coding:
-
- Telephone circuits are paired as 'tip' and 'ring' wires. On POTS
- (plain old telephone service) tip is 0 volts and ring is -48 volts (tip is
- not 'ground' though as it is a blanced line). The pairs must be
- distinguishable from one another easily so they are colour coded. The
- colour of the wire indicates whether it is tip or ring. In a quad wire
- green and black are tip while red and yellow are ring.
-
- pair# tip colour ring colour
- _____ __________ ___________
-
- 1 white blue
- 2 white orange
- 3 white green
- 4 white brown
- 5 white slate (silver)
- 6 red blue
- 7 red orange
- 8 red green
- 9 red brown
- 10 red slate
- 11 black blue
- 12 black orange
- 13 black green
- 14 black brown
- 15 black slate
- 16 yellow blue
- 17 yellow orange
- 18 yellow green
- 19 yellow brown
- 20 yellow slate
- 21 violet (purple) blue
- 22 violet orange
- 23 violet green
- 24 violet brown
- 25 violet slate
-
- An individual wire is identified by it's colour and the colour of
- it's stripe. The main colour determines whether it is tip or ring while
- the stripe identifies it's pair (i.e. a black wire with a blue stripe is
- tip of pair 11). In many cables the stripe is missing in which case the
- pairs are distinguished by the way they are twisted, by pulling back the
- sheath pairs are more obvious.
-
- As you can see there are only 5 tip colors and 5 ring colours (5
- x 5 = 25). a 100 pair cable is made up of four of these 25 pair bundles.
- The first bundle is wrapped by a white/blue binder string, the second by a
- white/orange binder, the third by a white/green and the fourth by a
- white/brown. This scheme can be extended infinitum.
-
- Some folks think that the order is:
- Pair Tip Ring
- 1 RED GRN
- 2 YEL BLK
- 3 BLU WHT,
- and that the 1st pair was backwards in a modular connector compared to the
- rest.
-
- Wrong. The polarity is off. Modular connectors reverse the polarity
- so they make the issue pretty confusing. A modular line cord (that is a
- properly made _telephone_ line cord) has a flat topology such that when
- laid on a table the top of both connectors is up. This means that a
- reversal (polarity wise) takes place. Tip becomes ring on all pairs (the
- wire is a ribbon in theory). the top of both connectors is up. A 'set'
- jack (the one inside the telephone) is wired backwards to compensate.
-
- In addition, the system employed throughout the (used-to-be) Bell
- System was actually very simple. There wer five colors assigned to "tip"
- and five colors assigned to "ring". This gives a total combination of
- twenty-five pairs (very convenient!).
-
- The colors assigned to the "tip" are;
-
- white wt
- red rd
- black bk
- yellow yl
- violet vi
-
- The colors assigned to the "ring" are;
-
- blue bl
- orange or
- green gr
- brown br
- slate sl (sometimes mistakenly called gray)
-
- Standard phone convention is to identify the "tip" first and then the
- "ring" when referring to a pair. Thus, the first five pairs of a telephone
- cable are the "white" pairs;
-
- white/blue wt/bl
- white/orange wt/or
- white/green wt/gr
- white/brown wt/bn
- white/slate wt/sl
-
- The next five are the "red" pairs:
-
- red/blue rd/bl
- red/orange rd/or
- red/green rd/gr
- red/brown rd/bn
- red/slate rd/sl
-
- And so on, until all twenty five pairs are identified. What happens
- when there are more than twenty-five pairs in a cable? Simple, enclose
- each twenty-five pair group in a color coded binder. And guess what the
- color coding is for the binder. Yep, the same as the wires in the binder.
- The first binder group is the "white/blue" binder the second is the
- "white/orange" binder, and so on. If it is necessary to refer to the
- twenty-sixth pair of a fifty pair cable it is referred to as "two
- white/blue" or 2-wt/bl. The seventy-ninth pair in a one-hundred pair cable
- is called "four white/brown" or 4-wt/bn. This all holds true for the first
- twenty-four binders in a cable. The twenty-fifth binder is a little
- different, and my recollection is a little hazy but I believe the binder
- colors are white-white-blue. Yes that's two whites and a blue. It might be
- two blues and a white. It's been a long time since I was in a cable over
- six hundred pairs. One thing I know for sure is that they double up on one
- of the binder colors after the twenty-fourth binder group.
-
- There is also a convention for the positioning the pairs on
- connecting blocks. The Ring is usually on the Right and the Tip is
- usually on the Top. As you can see there is a pattern here, Ring-Red-
- Right and Tip-Top. I guess this was done to make it easier for us dumb
- installers to remember! |-)
-
- The only difference in the color coding between telephone cable (the
- stuff used outside and strung along poles or underground in conduit) and
- telephone inside wiring (the gray colored stuff in the walls and up in the
- ceiling) is that the inside wire has each pair traced with the color of
- its mate. That is, the first pair is a white wire with a blue tracer and
- its mate is blue with a white tracer. This is done to avoid "splitting" a
- pair. Splitting is getting the ring of one pair and the tip of another.
- In outside phone cable each pair is twisted with its mate and the chances
- of splitting a pair are not as great (although it's been known to happen
- ;-)).
-
- With wiring done inside a house, a little history is in order. Back
- when we had party-lines,(I know, we still do, but very few still in
- service and none available for new service) three wires were necessary
- because a ground was required to make the bell ring. So, the original
- phone wiring had three conductors, red, green and yellow. Red and green
- were ring and tip respectively and yellow was the ground. Then people
- started getting away from party lines and into princess and trimline
- phones with lights in the dial. The yellow was no longer the ground and a
- black wire was added and the yellow and black were used to supply power
- for the lamps from a small transformer. Time marches on, and now people
- are getting second lines installed in their homes. Since the new phones
- get the power for their lamps from the phone line directly, the yellow
- and black are now "spare". The yellow is usually the ring and black is
- the tip. Of course, houses that have been pre-wired with six-pair inside
- wire would normally have line 1 on the white/blue pair and line 2 on the
- white/orange pair. In many pre-wire installations I have found that the
- sixth pair (red/blue) was used for transformer power, although I don't
- believe that was ever an official practice.
-
- Written by: Egghead Dude Edited by: The Conflict
- Golf City BBS
- CHiNA Node #5
-
- Hope you enjoyed this one, and once again, look for more! Please
- distribute this file freely, and if you really must speak to CHiNA,
- contact us on one of our member boards (a node list should be available
- wherever you receieved this file). Thanks for you support!
-
- A big HELLO to Mr. X, The Maestro, Barimor (hear you're doing wonders
- for the FiRM!), Jolly Green Giant, Feetsack, Lord Blix, Maxwell Smart, The
- Viper, etc...if you want to be said HELLO to, too bad, we don't like you!
- Really...we'll be seeing you!
-
-