New Home Connections

Posts: 1 · Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 6:01 pm Post subject: New Home Connections

I'm having some trouble working out how to connect up Vonage in my new home. Never had a phone line and cable guy is coming tomorrow to hook us up in Woolwich, Maine. We use suscom-maine and have requested their new 768 upload service because we had previous problems with upload in our old home nearby.

I went to Home Depot and bought some huge $99 Leviton block that has 6 phone connections and several cable connections. I have had two local "systems home wiring" guys out that do not seem to have a clue what to do with Vonage. The house is wired for cable and phones everywhere. For equipment I have two RT31P2's and a Wireless WRT54G. From previous experience I know I need to have the wireless connected on the first floor to reach the 1st and 2nd floors. We would like to have three lines total in the house with the ability to add two more if I move my office back into the house. One line is would be for a "house" phone. The second and third lines are for my wife's office upstairs (one for business calls, one for fax). However, we would like to have the ability to have a base downstairs for her office phone as well. We are currently planning to use GE 5.8 portable phones. The type you can program at the main base and then plug into a "dumb" base for charging.

This is a two story house with the connections arriving from underground to the front corner in the full basement. Basically not near anything I have described. I'm told that the jack wiring is set up with four lines.

My questions are......

Where should I hook up my modem?
Should I hook up the wireless to a modem on the first floor?
Should I piggyback the "house" phone adapter there with the wireless?
Can I, or should I, set up a second modem in my wife's second floor office and plug her phone adapter in there?
Someplace along the way I read that telephone wires are duplex? and you can plug Vonage into a properly wired jack upstairs and have it work in a similarly wired jack elsewhere? If this is correct is there a better way to do what I've described?

Thanks in advance for any help,

Peter

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

Captain51 wrote:

Where should I hook up my modem?
Should I hook up the wireless to a modem on the first floor?

I would hook up the modem and the wireless in a room on the first floor where you would like to have your computer. That way the wireless will be able to reach everywhere in the house.

Captain51 wrote:

Should I piggyback the "house" phone adapter there with the wireless?
Can I, or should I, set up a second modem in my wife's second floor office and plug her phone adapter in there?

Most internet services will only support one modem, so I don't think you should plan on a second modem. Figure on having all routers and Vonage adapters together in one place.

Captain51 wrote:

Someplace along the way I read that telephone wires are duplex? and you can plug Vonage into a properly wired jack upstairs and have it work in a similarly wired jack elsewhere? If this is correct is there a better way to do what I've described?

Telephone jacks are all wired in parallel with the telephone service source, so, yes, you can plug a Vonage adapter into a properly wired jack and it will energize all the other jacks. The parallel wiring is accomplished at those terminal blocks that you've bought (unless that wiring has already been done by the installer). The key, of course, is in the phrase "properly wired".