Registered Jacks - Twisted Pair

Twisted Pair

See also: Category 5 cable and TIA/EIA-568-B

Cables terminated in registered jack connectors used in building wiring and the telephone network normally consist of twisted pairs of wires. Wiring conventions were designed to take full advantage of the physical compatibility, thereby ensuring that using a smaller plug in a larger socket would pick up complete pairs, not a (relatively useless) two half pairs. But here again, there has been a problem.

The original concept was that the centre two pins would be one pair, the next two out the second pair, and so on until the outer pins of an eight-pin connector would be the fourth twisted pair. Additionally, signal shielding was optimised by alternating the live (hot) and earthy (ground) pins of each pair. This standard for the eight-pin connector is the USOC-defined pinout, but the outermost pair are then too far apart to meet the electrical requirements of high-speed LAN protocols.

Two variations known as T568A and T568B overcome this by using adjacent pairs of the outer four pins for the third and fourth pairs. For T568A, the inner four pins are wired identically to those in RJ14. In the T568B variant, different pairs are assigned to different pins, so a T568B jack is incompatible with the wiring pattern of RJ14. However, in relatively short connecting cables the performance differences between the pairs that are assigned to different pins are minimal, and T568A and T568B patch cables are usually regarded as interchangeable in general use.

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