Cat 3 Cable Wiring Diagram

The category 3 or cat3 standard was used heavily in the early 90s for wiring offices and homes.

Cat 3 cable wiring diagram. It is part of a family of standards defined jointly by the electronic industries alliance eia and the telecommunications industry association tia and published in tiaeia 568 b. Here is a wiring diagram and pin out. Cat 3 or category 3 wiring is useful for wiring small networks telephones and dial up internet connections. Cat3 can be relied on to handle data speeds of up to 10 mbps but no more.

The only difference between 568a and 568b wiring is that pairs 2 and 3 orange and green are swapped. Eiatia t568a t568b. There are two basic ethernet cable pin outs. It is a less expensive choice than cat 5 wiring which is appealing on a budget.

Category 3 cable commonly known as cat 3 or station wire and less commonly known as vg or voice grade as for example in 100basevg is an unshielded twisted pair utp cable used in telephone wiring. The following picture shows the wiring diagram of the two standards. Trunk cable used to be common in old office buildings that used the 5 line desk phones with the light up buttons to select the line. This color coding standard was introduced in mid of 1980s its not widely used these days.

Many older homes are also already wired with cat 3 and if you need to add additional phone jacks you can maintain the same standard. Since 100mbs ethernet only uses 4 of the 8 wires normally found in an ethernet cable even old 4 wire cat 3 telephone cabling can be wired. However for the crossover wiring method the rj45 pinouts on each end of the cat5e are different. It is the 568b diagram that we demonstrate in this tutorial and the 568a wiring is shown in the diagrams below mainly for illustration.

Converting home telephone wiring to ethernet. A straight through ethernet cable which is used to connect to a hub or switch and a crossover ethernet cable used to operate in a peer to peer fashion without a hubswitch. Straight wiring diagram standards. Cat 3 cables do use twisted pairs but the twist is much looser than you would see in a cat 5 cable.

Below is straight through wiring diagram of 568a color coding. Its still used in two line phone configurations but has largely fallen out of favor for wired networking thanks to the category 5e cables superior performance. When you are doing the straight through wiring the cable pinout on the two ends of the cat5e cable should be the same. Following is detail of these standards t568a wiring diagram.

Modular connector plug and jack pin out ethernet cable pin outs.