Yeah, phone net was designed with the idea that you would piggy back it over your existing phone wiring... the theory being that a standard house/business would be wired either all serial (one jack to the next) or in a star (all jacks coming back to a central punch block). Following this assumption, it was specifically designed to work over the unused pair (being yellow/black in standard station wiring). All PhoneNet REALLY cares about is having two wires from one box to either the next box, or to a central hub. It need not be twisted pair, and it need not be the yellow/black pair. Although, if you choose to use a different pair, either you need to make sure you wire it to the correct pins on the jack (and thus fake a y/b) or you will have to cut a custom wired flat cord as the boxes all expect the wires to be the outer two wires in an RJ-11. But there is nothing stopping you from using unused pairs in Ethernet and just use a custom flat cord (or break them out into their own jack). The single biggest problem with Phone net that I ran into was it was VERY picky over the wiring being correct. Unlike phones, you could not safely reverse pairs in a serial setup. Also, the fact that it expects there to be either serial wiring, or star wiring falls thru in most phone lines. And even depending on the unused pairs wasn't a surefire idea. In every Phone net system I installed, I was forced to do some degree of rewiring, or correcting the wiring. POTS phones are very forgiving to poor wiring, and many telco installers use that as an excuse to be lazy. In almost all POTS phone setups you will find some degree of "non spec", things like unused pairs not being connected, reversing pairs, mixing star and serial wiring, tapping mid line into a drop to extend for a new jack. Tapping was DEATH to phone net, it was the single worst thing you could do, as it caused things like ghosting (items showing up after they have been removed, or showing up more than once on the network), and random dropouts of networked devices. It also proved hard to track, as you almost had to physically trace every wire, looking for a tap. But all things considered, phone net was a much more econimical way of wiring a localtalk network. True localtalk cables were very expensive compared to cheap 2 pair phone cable, so even with rewiring, it still worked out to be the less expensive way to go. Even today, phone net works as a nice quick and dirty network when all you want is printer sharing. I keep a 25ft retractable cord and phonenet connectors connected to a Localtalk to Ethernet bridge. It lets me connect old Macs to the network (or my Newton) on the fly, and I can set it up anywhere in my office. When I am done, I just unhook the phonenet box, and let go, the retractable cord rewinds and pulls the box back to my hub shelf, where it hangs waiting for my next use. -chris <http://www.mythtech.net>