sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Cat-5e Jack Color?

For the most part, I have always used orange. I'm thinking of switching to blue as my secondary color, because cable and patch cords are easier to get, and it's less obtrusive.

Any thoughts?

Carl

Carl, There have been numerous posts on the perspectives of cable colors. Give the forums a search by clicking 'search' under 'Post New Topic'.

I've always used orange for data, unless a different color is specified by the customer. Usually my voice jacks will match the color of the faceplates or boxes. Ivory faceplates, ivory voice jacks, etc.

Here, my standard is to use a white plate and jack for voice and blue for data. We also use blue cable for data. We tried the same thing in using orange for data jacks, but color-to-color made more sense.

Here it kind of depends on the job. I generally try to use white for voice and blue for data, but there are those surprise cabling jobs (such as the one I had last Friday...3 hour drive to move a system and when I get it to the new location...loop-de-loop phone cabling...surprise surprise surprise!!!)

It can depend on what I have on hand sometimes...

I like white face plates with white voice jacks and orange data jacks.

It's really a matter of personal preference I think, yours and/or the customer's. Just be careful in hospitals, they have different meanings for different colors on their electrical outlets.

Well, the consensus is that I'm not doing anything different from the rest of you. We always match the voice jack to the faceplate color, and contrast (lot of black and gray) for fax and/or non-phone jacks. Data is orange and now maybe blue for ethernet and green, yellow and red for serial or point-to-point ethernet.

Blue cable has always been used for data because it's the best availabilty and cheapest. Coming from Cat-3 environment, voice cables used to be gray, now we use a different color than blue :-)

We still stock black and white for open wiring environments, so 9 times out of 10 the voice/data runs are white and blue.

Carl

When doing structured cabling I let the customer pick the colors. One of the Ford Dealers I have has white face plates and Red White and Blue inserts. Red White and Blue cabling also.
We match the color of the cable with the insert for all data, and if cat3 for voice we match the color of the face plate.

I use orange or blue for data and match the faceplate for voice.

White (voice) and blue (data). If I'm also doing a POS system, I use yellow.