home wiring and dead jacks

Posts: 73 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 19, 2006 Posts: 73

When I first got Vonage, I followed the directions and hooked it up to the house wiring (after first disconnecting outside lines). For some reason, I was able to get phone service through my 2 jacks downstairs, but none in the upstairs jack. I had been using the upstairs jack with Southwestern Bell for 10 years and no problems. I double checked the wiring, changed to the second connection just in case and no, the jack is dead to Vonage. When I called Vonage, they said that there must be a second wiring system in the house that's not connected to the downstairs jacks. That only makes a little sense to me, but I still can't find where they would have put the second set of wires in to upstairs.
Any other reasons for the upstairs not working when downstairs does?
Thanks

Posts: 1179 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1179

can you determine whether your home is configured with a home run pattern (i.e. all the jacks lead to one central location) or is it in a sequential pattern (i.e. all the jacks have 1 set of wires coming in and 1 set of wires going out from it)? If it is a home run pattern then tell us or post a picture for us to see how you disconnected your home from the telco. It could help us determine what exactly is going on.

Posts: 73 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 19, 2006 Posts: 73

Ok, now I am confused.
When I pulled the wires from the connection outside my house, I had 2 separate lines into the house at the time. I disconnected each pair and put the electrical tape on each. My understanding of my phone system is that all the wires ran to the outside connection (like the pretty picture of the old lightning prevention box on this website) and then to the phone company. That is why I was skeptical about their being a different set of wires upstairs vs downstairs. However, each of my jacks had wires for up to 4 connections. I didn't notice anything going out of the jacks though. Only in.
What would look different if it were not a home run system?
Thanks.

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

Hmmm, I wonder what would happen if you took the pairs that you disconnected at the box, and connected them to each other? Wouldn't that create a nice, neat closed loop of the whole house?

Posts: 73 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 19, 2006 Posts: 73

navydavy2001 wrote:

Hmmm, I wonder what would happen if you took the pairs that you disconnected at the box, and connected them to each other? Wouldn't that create a nice, neat closed loop of the whole house?

well, it's a possibility but I know for certain that the blues were to my home line and the oranges were to my second line when I got that one put in. That being the case, the blues worked fine for [/B]ALL [/U]the jacks in my house for 7 years before I had the phone guys out to show me how to connect the oranges for my second line into the house. I don't think they connect to each other. Sad

Posts: 1179 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1179

you will know if they are connected sequentially (i.e. not homerun) if you open up a jack and there are 2 sets of blue / white with blue stripes wires.

A homerun pattern will typically end at a junction box of some sort like in your basement.

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

sj2 wrote:

navydavy2001 wrote:

Hmmm, I wonder what would happen if you took the pairs that you disconnected at the box, and connected them to each other? Wouldn't that create a nice, neat closed loop of the whole house?

well, it's a possibility but I know for certain that the blues were to my home line and the oranges were to my second line when I got that one put in. That being the case, the blues worked fine for [/B]ALL [/U]the jacks in my house for 7 years before I had the phone guys out to show me how to connect the oranges for my second line into the house. I don't think they connect to each other. Sad

Dave hit the nail on the head. If you had two sets of wires going into the house, then the blues should be connected together and the blue/whites should be connected together to make everything work. I suspect that they were connect to screw terminals that were in turn connected the POTS line. When you removed them from the POTS connection you must have also separated them, and that removed the normal path for the Vonage service to reach the dead jacks.

Posts: 73 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 19, 2006 Posts: 73

but if taking those wires off the screws (like it said in the Vonage manual) make one jack not work, why do my others still work?

also from this forum in the installation instructions it says... (Some people have tried temporarily "bridging" line one, the blue pair, and line two, the orange pair, inside the Network Interface Unit, to see if that will make the "dead" jack start working. We don't recommend this unless you have a good understanding of basic telephone wiring AND you make absolutely sure that both pairs are disconnected from the telephone company's wiring.)

although I'm not sure that was what you meant by putting the wires together again.
When the weather gets warmer I'll have to go take pictures.

Posts: 1179 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1179

I think Dave was working off your statement here:

sj2 wrote:

I had 2 separate lines into the house at the time. I disconnected each pair and put the electrical tape on each.

I think what you are saying is that you had 2 lines coming into your home. Line 1 to your upstairs and line 2 to your downstairs or vice versa. Is that correct? Then putting those two sets of wires together will indeed work because your jacks upstairs are connected to one pair (say the blue pair) and the jacks downstairs are connected to the 2nd pair (say the orange pair). Once you disconnected them both from the terminals, they are basically shorted out. So now there is no way for the downstairs jacks to be physically connected to the upstairs jacks b/c they have been disconnected in one sense.

If you don't want to connect the wires together at the NIU, then what you need to do is to make sure that all your jacks (both upstairs and downstairs) have the exact same two pairs of wires on the line 1 terminals on the jacks. It should preferrably be blue/white with blue stripes.

Posts: 73 · Full Forum Member Joined: Mar 19, 2006 Posts: 73

mundy5 wrote:

I think Dave was working off your statement here:

sj2 wrote:

I had 2 separate lines into the house at the time. I disconnected each pair and put the electrical tape on each.

I think what you are saying is that you had 2 lines coming into your home. Line 1 to your upstairs and line 2 to your downstairs or vice versa. Is that correct? Then putting those two sets of wires together will indeed work because your jacks upstairs are connected to one pair (say the blue pair) and the jacks downstairs are connected to the 2nd pair (say the orange pair). Once you disconnected them both from the terminals, they are basically shorted out. So now there is no way for the downstairs jacks to be physically connected to the upstairs jacks b/c they have been disconnected in one sense.

If you don't want to connect the wires together at the NIU, then what you need to do is to make sure that all your jacks (both upstairs and downstairs) have the exact same two pairs of wires on the line 1 terminals on the jacks. It should preferrably be blue/white with blue stripes.

AHA! I see the confusion. I had 2 phone lines coming into the house. I could make each of the jacks in my house have 2 different phone numbers, one for business and one for home. I did not have it set up that way. I originally had only the home phone line into the house and it worked in ALL the jacks. About 7 years after moving in, I added the second phone line for the computer and made one of my downstairs jacks have 2 separate lines - one the original home line and the other the new computer phone line. The upstairs jack never changed.
Does that make more sense now? If one incoming line was able to get my phone connection to all 3 jacks in my home (one of which is upstairs) then why would only the downstairs ones work with Vonage? I kept all 3 connections the same as when I had one incoming phone line. ie they were all blue and blue/white connected to the screws.