3 Lines w/ Vonage

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: May 11, 2006 Posts: 4

I just signed up for a new Vonage account, I haven't received my phone adapters yet, but I had some questions about my wiring setup.

We have 3 lines + a fax. All the phones are in the same office, and there is no wiring at all currently so I can start from scratch. The phones are in the same room with the router and phone adapter. The phone I purchased can have up to 4 lines, but in the back of the phone there is only two plugs for phone lines. One says lines 1-2, and the other says lines 3-4. How do I go about wiring into this?

Your help is greatly appreciated, please let me know if you need any further info on my setup.

Thanks again,

Mark

Posts: 400 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: May 05, 2005 Posts: 400

First things first. Are the 3 phone lines you are using have different phone#'s? If so ,you'll need at least 2 phone adapters

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: May 11, 2006 Posts: 4

Yup, 3 different phone #'s, and I did order two phone adapters. Thanks for your response.

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

Let's assume for the moment that you're not going to use "house wiring", i.e., jacks in the walls. There are two types of splitters that you want to get. One is designed to separate out two different lines from a single jack, like the 2-line jacks on your 4-line phone, into separate jacks, one for each line. Let's call that a separator. On this type the ports are generally labelled line 1, line 2, and line 1-2. The second is a simple Y splitter that just turns a single port into 2 ports by paralleling all the wiring. The ports are generally unlabelled.

For the 4-line phone, you'll want to plug two of the separators into the two jacks on the phone. This gives you for jacks, one for each line. Then run 4 separate cords to the 4 ports on the two adapters. If that was the only phone you had you'd be done. Since you have at least one fax machine, you'll want to put Y-splitters into one or more of the ports on the adapters to make the Vonage lines at those ports available to more than one phone or fax machine.

I don't know how clear that is. Post again and we'll go on.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: May 11, 2006 Posts: 4

Thats very clear Steve, thanks for drawing it out for me. My equipment should be delivered tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.

Thanks for the help,

Mark

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

Good luck. That's a lot of new lines. Be sure to test each with a nice simple phone before you start setting up a complicated wiring scheme.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: May 25, 2006 Posts: 3

just for clarification your saying you have three active phone lines and several phones that can take up to 4 lines?

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: May 11, 2006 Posts: 4

We bought an RCA phone that had 4 lines. Each RCA base unit could have 1 cordless phone with it. We returned the phones because we wanted 2 cordless phones, and didn't want to buy another base unit. We purchased some Motorola phones that were both cordless and are 2 line capable, then purchased a single line cordless for the home phone. The Motorola phones have not arrived yet, I'll let you know how they work.

We went wth two seperate phone systems because 2 lines are for business, 1 fax, and 1 home. We figured the home system would be used the least so we just have a single cordless for that. Most of the 4 line systems were just too expensive to justify.