Hi folks! So I've come across some Cat3 cabling, and I need to re-terminate one end of them but all I have are Cat5e keystone jacks. Would that work at all?

I don't see why not.

This will be limited to CAT3 network speeds even with the new terminations, correct?

Make sure you replicate the wire color code to pin assignments used on the original jack, 568A or 568B...

Yup, should work fine. I'm kinda doing the opposite; my house is wired up with Cat5e everywhere, and I'm using some of it as vanilla phone wire, with a Cat5e jack on every outlet. The RJ11 phone jacks plug right in and everything works.

Sometimes the narrower 6-pin RJ11 plug will damage the outer pins in the 8-pin Ethernet socket. Those outermost pins are pressed back by the edges of the RJ11 plug.

This internal spring/pin damage usually doesn't matter unless you later try to use that same jack for real Ethernet purposes.

My own approach is to not trust 8-pin jacks for Ethernet if that jack has ever had a 6-pin 'telephone' plug inserted. If I want it to be reliable for networking I will usually remove and discard that jack and install a new one.

Thanks guys! I thought it might be okay but I wanted to check. It looked like the wiring was pretty similar, but the colors were really difficult to make out on these cables. The slow speed isn't an issue since they're just being used for phone lines. I'm not touching the phones at all. I wouldn't touch these jacks either if the plates weren't using some weird system. All the stuff I have is the keystone standard, and these don't fit, sadly. I'll just rewire them.

Thanks again!

Colors?! Try being color-blind! I hate wiring. Damned colors...

-jk

Just ensure the red and black wires end up on the two middle contacts of the 8p jack. The rest is gravy.

Lol


That would be rough, but in this case it's not a hindrance. The problem is that even with perfect vision, all these colors look the same. Whoever made this wiring created almost zero distinction between the wires, so the colors look almost identical. What's worse (for both me AND you), is that the stripes on these wires are nearly nonexistent. There's almost nothing to distinguish the color wires from the color/white wires. I wasn't sure if this was indicative of Cat3 cabling in general, or if it was just the dumb manufacturer of this particular type of cable.