One phone works, one phone doesn't using same telephone port

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 16, 2006 Posts: 2

I unplugged the house from the telephone company and have now distributed the Vonage signal throughout the house. I used a standard corded phone to make that the two other phone ports were working correctly and they were.

I then plugged in my Uniden PowerMax 5.8ghz phone into one of the plugs- no dial tone. I then retried the cheap phone in that same plug and it worked. I thought that perhaps there was a problem with the Uniden? Well, I then plugged the Uniden into the Linksys Voip router and it worked just fine.

Why would only one of the two phones work? Any suggestions for addressing this issue?

Thanks
/tl
SF

Posts: 4777 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: Aug 30, 2005 Posts: 4777

When you say that the Uniden failed to work when you plugged it into one of plugs, you're referring to one of the house wiring phone plugs? Does it also fail if you plug it into a different plug? Are you using the same phone cable when you plug it into the Vonage adapter and get success?

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 16, 2006 Posts: 2

Steve48 wrote:

When you say that the Uniden failed to work when you plugged it into one of plugs, you're referring to one of the house wiring phone plugs?

Yes, that's correct.

Steve48 wrote:

Does it also fail if you plug it into a different plug? Are you using the same phone cable when you plug it into the Vonage adapter and get success?

I tried new cables and it worked. I find it really strange that one phone will work with a given cable and plug and a different phone won't. Regardless, it seems to be fixed. Thanks a lot.

Posts: 185 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 18, 2005 Posts: 185

look at the bottom of the Uniden and the bottom of the cheap phone you used, there should be Ring Equivalency Numbers (REN). What are they?

Posts: 3198 · Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 7:07 pm Post subject:

what does the ren have to do with this situation?

Posts: 17 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 21, 2006 Posts: 17

The REN or Ringer Equivalency Number refers to the number of telephone ringers the ring-generating circuitry in the router can handle. A "ringer" for the sake of definition is the load characteristic of a standard 500-style telephone set (dubbed as "Old Reliable"), which is a REN of 1.0. The newer phones manufactured during the past 20 years exhibit REN's more in the neighborhood of .1-.5, far less than "Old Reliable." The FCC requires that the REN of a telephone set have its REN stamped somewhere on the bottom of it.

Say, for example, your router supports 5.0 REN's. The sum total of all the telephone sets' REN's should be at, or less than 5.0.

Posts: 1123 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: May 26, 2005 Posts: 1123

reebok, didn't you know that? Lol

Posts: 37 · Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 11:36 pm Post subject:

If you use a standard phone cord to connect the phone adapter to a wall jack, the polarity will be reversed at the other jacks. Get yourself a phone line tester at RadioShack and plug it into one of the jacks. Most phones don't care about reversed polarity, but there are some and the Uniden may be one of them that are sensitive to reversed polarity. A standard cord has the wires crossed. Get yourself a straight-through cord or crimp one yourself so that you have the correct polarity at each jack and try again.

Posts: 44 · Full Forum Member Joined: Nov 01, 2005 Posts: 44

Your post didn't say what type of device you have, but if its what I have (an RTP300) you should realize that the two phone jacks on the back of the device are not the same phone number. If you want to plug two phones into it you need to get one of those phone splitter dealies. I did this and it worked.

You can tell for sure by logging into the device on http://192.168.15.1/ go to the status tab and the voicel subtab. You shoud see that the second one is not provisioned.

Posts: 82 · Posted: Mon Feb 06, 2006 7:26 pm Post subject:

I have this same issue. After reading this thread...again NO answer. I have a 2 phone cordless phone currently and cannot have both phones in use talking to another number or caller. If I use a splitter say on phone port 1 and use two corded phones at once the second corded phone is like dead as is the cordless. Vonage's end of story is you cannot use two phones at once. Does it work for others??? Please somebody answer this correctly.