Home > Help, Info, Tips, Advice, Specs, Fun > Advanced techie stuff > Panasonic > Panasonic ports and jacks

Panasonic ports and jacks

The nomenclature for phones connected to Panasonic phone system control units can be confusing. You'll hear about jacks, stations, extensions and ports. Sometimes they mean the same thing, and sometimes they don't. I'll try to clear it up. Click here for more help with telecom terminology.

The box or plate on a wall where you plug-in your phone is a jack.

Despite its male name, a jack considered to be female, and a plug is considered to be male. If you don't understand this, find someone of the opposite sex, and stand naked in front of a mirror.

A traditional phone jack has four wires, arranged in two pairs.

In Panasonic systems, the green and red wires are considered to be the voice (or analog) pair. The black and yellow wires are considered to be the data (or digital) pair.

A jack with four wires can be thought of as one port... or two ports.

 
Panasonic's eXtra Device Port architecture (in digital systems) allows the two pairs to be separated, so you can operate a digital phone on the data pair (one port), and an ANALOG SINGLE-LINE phone or device (such as a fax, pc modem, answerer or credit card terminal) on the voice pair (another port).
The single-line device can be plugged into the XDP jack on the back of a phone, or directly into any jack that has a working voice pair. It is not necessary to have a digital phone in a jack, to use an analog phone or device.

IMPORTANT: If you don't need an XDP in a particular location, you can "send" that voice pair to another location, by separating the voice and data pairs where they come out of the control unit, probably with a punch-down block.
 
  • A Panasonic ANALOG MULTI-LINE phone, such as the KX-T7730, requires all four wires when used in either an analog or a digital system -- it uses more system resources than a digital phone.
  • You can't plug a multi-line phone into an XDP.
  • Panasonic "system" cordless phones -- such as the KX-TD7896 -- are considered to be analog phones, and require a four-wire jack, with XDP disabled.