sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring BIX, PBX Terminations

This sound suspiciously familiar as in "get rid of the phone guy, we are IT the wave of the future and can do it all. VoIP is the wave of the furure which will be silence since the network is down and you can't call IT. I am currently going through trying to make IP packets pass voice and modem data and answering management questions about why VOIP is not working. They bought it, I have to fix it. Also dealing with IT techs who have no clue what is between the jack in the cubical and the one in the IDF closet patch panel. Good thing we took all those 110 block wires to patch panel a few years ago. 110 blocks are very similar to bix, just more common in the US.

That being said, you say you can easily accomplish the data side by tracing the name on the network drop, I hope the name is always correct. The data drop has eight spaghetti like plastic covered thingys called wires. They are broken in to groups of two wires referred to as pairs. These pairs are color coded. But you say you don't care about learning about wiring. So, those RJ-11 jacks you refer to have four wires or two pairs. The RJ-45s you plug your network in to have eight wires or four pairs. Same concept. Your network uses two of the four pairs (unless it is GNet or uses some versions of PoE), the phone uses one of the two.

You refer to bix panels. How many wires to each panel? 18 phones. More than likely this is documented somewhere. On the other hand with only 18 phones it may be in some phone guys head.

If you had ever had to work with ethernet cross connects on 110 or bix blocks you would be familiar with how only two pair (orange/green) are used.

If you are going to take over the voice side, you better become familiar with the wiring. If you can't or won't hire the telephone guy back.

voip the future? maybe. All my clients even big ones with new installations have T1 and some times ISDN installed because they used because the site is outside the DSL range. But in almost all my commercial installations, there is almost no voip installed from the site..to the remote site. Voip is only installed locally on the network to Avaya stations. After that, its copper trunks or t1 for voice and data on dsl.