Cat5e House Network Wiring Colour Order

Ir0nman · May 7, 2014

About 4 years ago I installed some Cat5e Wall jacks that pluged into my router.

Recently I had a contractor install some wall jacks.
I went to put the RJ45 ends on the and noticed that the old RJ45 ends I put on had the colour order:
Orange
White-Orange
White-Green
White-Blue
Blue
Green
Brown
White-Brown

After thinking about it for awhile I realized why I wired it that way.
The jack had the colours in that order:

So the order to the RJ45 connector should have been:
White-Orange
Orange
White-Green
Blue
White-Blue
Green
White-Brown
Brown

My question is why has my network been working with no issues for the last 4 years?
I realize now that some of the white and solid colours where mixed up. Does the white and solid not matter so much? Just as long as the colours are correct?

rhysiam · May 7, 2014

100mb only uses 2 pairs (4 wires). If you've only been running 10/100 you may not have needed the wires that were patched incorrectly.

Alternatively, did you patch the other end as well? If you make the same mistake on both ends it doesn't matter.

scout_03 · May 8, 2014

see this for your cable how to connect them as they should http://www.alatec.com/info/rj45.html

bill001g · May 8, 2014

As long as both ends of the cable were done the same it likely doesn't matter. It is more important that the same wire go to the same position on both ends and the pairs are kept correct. Its not like the electricity can see the color of the plastic.

Ir0nman · May 8, 2014

rhysiam :

I believe the wall jack was done correctly as shown in the picture in the original message (not my image).
The wall jacks are pretty dummy proof. They have the colours right beside where you punch them down:

^^Mine didn't have the pin numbers which lead me to my mistake at the RJ45 end.

So I believe Wall Jack is correct and RJ45 end has some white and solids swapped.

I've always had great speeds downloading, netflix, streaming and playing online games etc...
I'm confused to as why it worked so well. Maybe with the correct wiring on the RJ45 end I will get even better speeds.

rhysiam · May 8, 2014

I don't think you'll get better internet. You need all four pairs to step up from 100Mbps to 1Gbps, but if your internet is faster than 100Mbps I'm very jealous!

If you're really sure one end was correct and the other wasnt, my only explanation is that you happened to have the two pairs required for 100Mbps wired correctly and worked from that. If you got your router a couple of years ago, it might not even support 1Gbps anyway, and it's only an advantage if you're trying to copy to/from another device which also supports 1Gbps and can take advantage of it (it becomes pretty important if you're working from a NAS for example, or want to transfer large files between devices on your network). For internet, streaming, etc, 100Mbps is plenty fast enough.

Ir0nman · May 8, 2014

rhysiam :

If my wall jack is the same as the one shown in the picture, which I believe it is as it explains why I wired the RJ45 connector the way I did, only Green and White-Green are correct the rest have the solid colours and the white colours mixed up.

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Cat5e House Network Wiring Colour Order

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Ir0nman

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rhysiam

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