How can I connect my whole-house telephone jacks to my VOIP adapter?

Reply to topic
11 posts
My house has a bunch of telephone jacks (around 8?) and they are all home-run directly to the telco box outside the house.

I'd like to place my voip adapter in the basement and use it to power all of the telephone jacks in the house.

Is this possible?

I think if I open the telco box I can disconnect the landline and connect a new "master" connection.

Does any of this make any sense?
Open the Telco box outside, normally it's just a single screw to open the "Customer" side of the panel. Inside there will be (likely) two short phone cables plugged into RJ-11 jacks. Unplug both/all of them. Plug your ATA into any phone jack in the house. Done.

A good way to test if you still have a dialtone on your house jacks is to unplug the wiring at the NID (the box outside) and make sure the dialtone went away.
It doesn't sound like this is the case, but as a caveat, you obviously don't want to discconnect the NID if you are using DSL.

If you were using DSL, you'd want to terminate the inbound POTS line on your modem, but remove the POTS cross connect ONLY from the feed/distrbute daisy chain. Usually a small 66 or 110 block.
This is really one of the simplest procedures possible. The first 2 posts cover the basics but if you get in over your head due to the DSL issues such as Frennzy mentioned, post details and/or pics and we'll get ya there.
Thanks everybody!

I plugged the ATA adapter into a jack and it didn't work. It turns out that it was wired (at the NID) to the second phone line. heh.

Tomorrow I'm going to switch the cabling at the NID and see what happens.

The jack was wired that way with only two conductors? Are you sure the second line (pins 2 & 5) on the jack wasn't wired up for "L1" on the demarc? Might be just a simple job at the jack itself.
Yeah, it seems strange.

Inside the customer side of the NID (?) there are four posts. Two on top and two on the bottom.

All of the house had red/green wired to the bottom posts except this basement jack which had red/green wired to the top posts. I didn't see yellow/black connected to anything in the NID.

Does that make sense?
Yes, it was wired how you explained it. Two POTS lines, one went to everywhere else and the other went to that jack you tried to use.
Sounds about right. Someone probably had a fax machine on that one jack at some point in the past or something along those lines. POTS uses Red/Green for L1 and Yellow/Black for L2 in general, though the colors can vary if they use Cat5 instead. How that gets wired up varies; sometimes there's a 66 block inside somewhere that distributes it to each jack in a star topology. Other times it's a ring. Most often, I see it as a star topology with the NID itself as the central patching location. That's annoying to most guys like me but a complete non-issue for most use cases.

If you have no internal patching capability, you can get it working by putting everything from L2 on the NID to L1 and pulling the plug to sever that connection. If anyone futzes with the NID, they could patch your system into the main POST one but that's pretty darned unlikely.
Well, I changed the wiring at the NID for that extra phone line and now it's working perfectly.

Thanks again everybody for the help!
Glad it's working. Always nice when it's relatively easy, eh?
11 posts