So I ran into one of our phone techs today and asked him why they chose to use 8 pin jacks and cat 3 cable. In the past, they would treat them like a normal USOC jack and terminate 1 pair on each jack so the user could have 2 jacks at their desk. Due to a lot of failures and mislabeled cables installed by contractors, they now require the 8 pin jack to be wired with all 4 pairs. They then test the voice cable on all 4 pairs. I still don't necessarily agree with using an 8 pin jack for voice, but this kind of makes sense.
