For home, 2 pair CAT3 for telephone is more standard, at least here anyway. 4 pair with RJ-45's is standard for offices. If you're going to run 4 pair for phones, you'll probably want to terminate 2 pairs at the jack, RJ-11, and leave the other 2 pairs unterminated. (2 pair phone gives you either 2 plain phone lines to each location, or the ability to run some PBX systems. 4 pair would add the ability to run almost any PBX.)

Something that's worth mentioning is that CAT5 cable isn't a better replacement for CAT3 for phones. Many or most phone terminations don't work reliably with CAT3 cable, because the insulation is tougher and the IDC connections don't always cut through right.

Home runs for phones ARE the better way to do it, no doubt, but with phones it's less of an issue, at least to me, than video or data. With data, daisy chains simply won't work at all. With TV, as hbis mentioned, you've got serious losses to worry about. (3db is half, by the way.) With regular phone, daisy chains using quality equipment is electrically fine. It is, of course, harder to troubleshoot, less flexible for future phone work, and not compatible with a PBX. Do run all the wires through all the splices if you daisy chain or splice.

So for a $500,000 home, you'd be crazy not to do home runs for phone. For a tiny house, I think a couple of daisy chains are fine if it saves a lot of time. I'm not saying this because one person deserves better wiring than the other, but because one house is much more likely to have 3+ phone lines or a pbx.

In this area, for an office, people are generally doing 2 CAT5e's and 1 CAT3 to each cube or office. Reception areas will get an extra phone line or two for fax. If they need more data than that, they put a switch in for that office/cube. For a home, I'd think just one CAT5 would be fine almost anywhere.

I never used any of the "all in one" cable just because the last time I looked it was at least 2x the price of the individual cables added together.

Oh, and if you do run home runs for the phone, don't splice it from the jack to the panel, and leave room to re-terminate. Then if someone wants to later, they can re-end the cable to CAT3 RJ-45, and run 10BaseT Ethernet on it. If, as you said, you're not running any data cables for these jobs, that could again make you the hero to somebody later on. (10BaseT might be "old" and "slow", but it's reliable, and way faster than any home Internet connection I've ever heard of.)

Brian - have we confused you yet? [Linked Image]