Dial-tone works for a while, then nothing

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 13, 2006 Posts: 7

I am going to try to get a better look tomorrow, and maybe get some pictures, for better reference. The demarc point looks a lot like the one recently posted, where the poster was helping his mom, except with more wires.

I really appreciate the help so far; I will update this post with more useful info tomorrow.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 13, 2006 Posts: 7

I still have not been able to get pics, but I went down and looked at it again. There are two cables coming in to the bottom of the demark point. One is thick (looks thicker than, say, Cat5), with green shielding. The other is a thin one with typical gray shielding. Is one of these cables the cable that distributes the phone around the whole house?

I am going to try to trace the wires in a bit, but I was hoping someone knew what these cables were.

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

twistah wrote:

I still have not been able to get pics, but I went down and looked at it again. There are two cables coming in to the bottom of the demark point. One is thick (looks thicker than, say, Cat5), with green shielding. The other is a thin one with typical gray shielding. Is one of these cables the cable that distributes the phone around the whole house?

I am going to try to trace the wires in a bit, but I was hoping someone knew what these cables were.

Which ones have which color wires?

Is your POTS service still connected and working? Do you have a voltmeter?

Which wires are connected together at present? You indicated that you have a cable with red, green, yellow, and black, of which only the red and green are connected. But to what? Likewise you have another cable with blue, blue/white and orange, orange/white connected. Again, connected to what?

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 13, 2006 Posts: 7

Steve48 wrote:

twistah wrote:

I still have not been able to get pics, but I went down and looked at it again. There are two cables coming in to the bottom of the demark point. One is thick (looks thicker than, say, Cat5), with green shielding. The other is a thin one with typical gray shielding. Is one of these cables the cable that distributes the phone around the whole house?

I am going to try to trace the wires in a bit, but I was hoping someone knew what these cables were.

Which ones have which color wires?

Is your POTS service still connected and working? Do you have a voltmeter?

Which wires are connected together at present? You indicated that you have a cable with red, green, yellow, and black, of which only the red and green are connected. But to what? Likewise you have another cable with blue, blue/white and orange, orange/white connected. Again, connected to what?

The POTS service should be completely disconnected. Unfortunately, I do not have a voltmeter or any other type of testing equipment. (I might back in college, but I am on spring break at my parent's house, which so far has involved a lot of Vonage set-up Wink

)

I will try to get pictures so as not to confuse this any further, and I am sorry for my vague posts -- this is partly because I know very little about phone wiring and partly because its very hard to see the connections.

From what I can see, its almost identical to the picture posted here:
http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic11782.html

Unfortunately, it's impossible to get this sort of view of our outlet/demark because of the angle it's at.

See how in that picture there's a thick black cable in the bottom? We have the same thing, but it's green. We also have the thin gray cable which is right next to it. These are seperate from the cables which have wires coming out; they look and are hooked up exactly how they are in that picture.

There are two other cables coming from the outside wall. One has what I think is quad wiring, the other one has a lot of wires, and looks like Cat3 wiring.

We have every single cable present in that picture, and then some. We have all the quad stuff you see, we have that blue/white cable (or maybe even two seperate ones -- one from the shielded cable, and one that looks like it connects two points on the outlet.) In addition, we also have the orange/white twisted pair. This is why I guessed I could just pull the blue/white, orange/white, red and green wires, but I don't want to screw it up by pulling random wires.

Anyway, I'll try to get a picture tomorrow, sorry for all the confusion.