by Michael Riley

Created on: January 14, 2009

Installing a new phone line is a relatively easy task that most do-it-yourselfers can perform. While the telephone company is responsible for hooking up the phone line to your house, they will only install wiring in your home for a fee. You can also hire an electrician to run your wiring but it will cost you plenty for something that you can do yourself.

All phone lines enter your home via a

Network Interface Device (NID). This is the gray box that the phone company installs on the exterior of your home that your phone lines are attached to. On the cover of the box, it will typically say, "Customer Access". This is the portion that you are allowed to open and connect additional phone lines to.

In this portion of the NID, accessible by loosening a 7/16" nut, you will see terminal posts with red and green marks next to them. These terminals are what the phone lines that enter your house are attached to. Along with the terminals, you will see a small phone cord attached that goes into a typical phone jack receptacle. This is what attaches the red and green terminals to the phone companies' cable.

Before we go any further, you need to know the standard wire color combinations for phone lines. In older applications you will see four (4) strand phone cable that has Green, Red, Black, and Yellow wires.

Inside the NID you will see the Green and Red wire attached to the applicable terminals and the Black and Yellow wires wrapped around the main wire (not connected). This indicates that you have one activated line entering your house utilizing the Green and Red wires. (Phones only require two wires to work properly.)

In newer applications, you probably have CAT 5 cable. This cable has eight (8) strands of wire with a range of colors. CAT 5 cable is used for installation of phones and Ethernet connections for hooking up your desktop or laptop on a Local Area Network (LAN).

The color combinations corresponding to the old four strand cable are as follows:

White with blue wire = Green

Blue with white wire = Red

White with orange wire = Black

Orange with white wire = Yellow

(The other four wires are not necessary for this discussion.)

Now that you have the wire schemes down, the first thing that you have to consider is what type of line you need. Do you need to add another location for a phone using your existing number or do you need an entirely separate line with a different phone number?

In the first instance, you might have done some basement remodeling and you want to put a phone

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