I was working in an office that a client has just taken over

this is the wiring in the existing patch panels.

Your camera is upside down

Usually you will have patch panels fully punched for the points in the offices (known as 'the floor'), and a seperate patch panel which comes FROM the telephone PBX CCU, so port 1 will be ext1, port 2 will be ext2 etc.  You then patch from the PBX patch to the floor patch.

You can get 'telephone' patches designed especially for it and they are cheaper, but many people just use normal patches.

When cat5e first came out they did often only patch down the two pairs required for TCP/IP - a pair for sending and a pair for recieving.  Often they would use a single cat5e cable for a dual port!  The problem with this is that while it works fine for normal cat5e 10/100/1000, it does not work with many comms devices, and doesn't support power over ethernet (used by IP telephone, wifi access points etc) which uses the two other pairs for 48v DC power.

scotspark wrote on Jan 21^st, 2012, 5:43pm:


Yea, if they had used one cable for a double point, the other two pairs would be punched down on the the next patch panel way.