Max house lines on Motorola ATA?

Posts: 15 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Nov 14, 2004 Posts: 15

Ok, here is the scoop. New house with 8 Cat 5 lines. Converted to Vonage, and have Motorola ATA. Installed a Channelvision Control block and hooked four of the house line to it and also a line to the ATA. Everything worked fine. Well its been two months so this morning I hooked the other four lines to the Channelvision block. And guess what, sparatic dial tone and dropped calls. I disconnected the four and back to good service.

Question: Why the max of 3-5 house lines?
Question: Any after market device to up the voltage to allow more lines?
I mean, what do companies that convert to VoIP do with thousands of lines? They do not have an ATA device for each line?

Ideas

Rob

Posts: 110 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Mar 06, 2004 Posts: 110

You may be able to better diagnose the problem by figuring out what your Ringer Equivalence Number is before and after adding those lines. You can find out more about how to calculate a REN by googling it, or read here: http://www.atis.org/tg2k/_ringer_equivalency_number.html

Some newer phones (unlike older analog ones) have a REN of less than 1 -- like cordless models with more than one handset. But others can be greater than 1.

It's not clear what the max. REN for the Motorola ATA is. The older CIsco max'd out at 3 or four I believe. You are probably exceeding that number, but, you might not be! You might have a short on some of the wires on the other jacks that is causing the problem.

Posts: 15 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Nov 14, 2004 Posts: 15

Plyons,

Thanks for the tip.

The additional lines that I added to the system did not have any phone sets connected to them. I will however check each one to see if it has a problem.

Posts: 110 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Mar 06, 2004 Posts: 110

Reconnect them one at a time, right?

Sporadic dial tone and dropped calls could be a crossed pair or something like that in one of the runs.

Posts: 3 · Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2004 11:51 am Post subject:

I have 7 phones connected to my motorola vt1000v. 2 cordless and the rest are regular cheap phones. Works great.