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I popped off a wall jack for one of the phone connections in my house because I was curious to see if it was using cat5 that I could use to change some of them to rj45 for ethernet instead and got what seems to be 2 cat5 cables. (Green and brown cables have been folded back and taped to the wires)

I'm interested if anyone knows why there would be 2 of these cables hooked up because anything I've found online with these jacks has just been 1 cable.

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    Is the socket daisy-chained to another socket?
    – mike65535
    May 26, 2018 at 10:26

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There are multiple wires on the socket because it is a wired continuation on to the next RJ11 jack in another part of the house. In fact if you locate all the phone jacks in your house you will likely find them all connected together. The reason for this is because the wire set is capable of allowing for a landline phone to be moved from room to room OR for multiple phone sets to be installed.

You would not want to use this wiring for an Ethernet type connection. For that you will need to pull new cables from each location where you want to have an RJ45 back to a central location where you would locate a network hub or switch. The ease or difficulty of getting the new wiring in place will depend a lot on how your house is constructed and to some degree on the locations that you intend to locate the RJ45 jacks.

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  • Interesting :) Makes sense. Unlikely that I'll be doing anything, but I am quite curious on how it's set up. We have internet phone lines (Cox communications) and the wires all lead to a box outside the house that labeled as DSL. Would this make any difference in what could be done easily?
    – abney317
    May 26, 2018 at 17:39
  • Do you mean that the RJ11 jack that you pictured was specifically wired up for IP based internet phone sets? Or are you using conventional old style landline phone sets? In either case there is no "easy way" to try to convert that wiring to Ethernet. You will have to string new wires for that or give up on wiring and go the WiFi wireless route.
    – Michael Karas ♦
    May 26, 2018 at 18:03
  • Yeah we've got a modem with a coax cable going to it from the cable company and that has a telephone-out going into the wall which feeds the rest of the house I guess
    – abney317
    May 26, 2018 at 18:56
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The other cable carries telephone service onward to another jack.

Telephone service is wired in a tree topology, not a star topology like ethernet.

Cat-5 is a specific grade of cable. You cannot presume any cable is cat-5 simply because of the presence of those colors. Those are the standard color codes for pairs 1-4 in any cable.

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