Help with phone wiring, please...

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Mar 04, 2004 Posts: 12

First, Happy New Year!!! Also, thanks for the support in advance.

I have a strange question, but hopefully I came to the right place. I have had Vonage for about 9 mths. now and it has been wonderful. Recently, I had to add an addition to my house since it was too small. The construction crew routed a new phone line from the new addition to the telco box on the outside of the house. They left it disconnected at my request so that they wouldn't short out my Vonage modem and now I'm having some problems connecting it to the pre-existing wiring.

- Inside the telco box (customer side) there are a lot of wires, but only 6 are connected. There are two sets of red, green, black & yellow screws. On the bottom set, there are 2 reds going to the red screw and 2 black wires going to the black screw. The wires also appear to be a little thicker than the others.
- On the top set of screws, there are 2 wires (solid orange and white with orange spots) going to the red screw and that's it.

My problem is that when I connect the 4 wires that appear to be connected properly on the jack in the new addition, I get no dial tone. Since the wire goes all the way to the telco box, I can't daisy-chain it so to speak to one of the other jacks inside the house. Anybody out there no what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks again,

Jorge

Posts: 19 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 05, 2005 Posts: 19

Jorge,

I'm going to make a few assumptions here, ask for some more information, and then we'll go from there!!!

From the sounds of it, your telco box is wired "funky". It may work, but it doesn't sound like the right way it is done. Let me see if I have this visual right.

red screw green screw
black screw yellow screw

red screw green screw
black screw yellow screw

Is that correct? Technically each "pair" of screws is supposed to be one line. (red and green go together and black and yellow). So, a proper arrangment would be wires on the top red and top green = line 1. Wires on the top black and top yellow = line 2. And so on.... however your wires are "crossed" between lines. This is working because you don't need them to be wired properly back to the phone company anyway. So as long as you have continuity between all cables within the house, your Vonage will work.

First, I'm assuming you only have one Vonage telephone number and that you have no additional POTS lines that you use? Also, how many telephones are connected inside your house?

If this is correct, then you only need two wires (per cable) for your telephone service to work. So, you don't have to try to connect all four that are inside the phone jack in your new addition. I will assume they wired the jack right in the new addition. If so, and there are green, red, black, and yellow wires inside the jack--then you only need the red and green wires, OK? If there are a different combination of colors inside the jack, let me know and we'll deal with that. Usually the wires that are in the "middle" of the phone jack are used for line 1 and the outer two are used for line 2--so you would need whatever two colors are in the middle.

Now, you find those red and green wires inside the telco box from the cable the construction crew ran. The Orange/Orange-White wires seem to be out of place--so forget about them for right now. Connect the red wire from your new addition to the other red wires. Likewise connect the green to the black wires. (If there was another color combination in the cable from the new addition, then try to improvise--but remember you only need two wires).

Let me know if that works...and/or post additional information and we'll get it done!

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Mar 04, 2004 Posts: 12

All of your assumptions are right. The telco box's screws are as follows:

Yellow Green
Red (solid orange and orange/white wires) Black

Yellow Green
Red (2 red wires) Black (2 black wires)

>> 'Technically each "pair" of screws is supposed to be one line.'

This would make sense because I think the previous owners may have had two lines installed. One of the rooms has two different wall jacks, but only one jack works.

I have 1 Vonage number with one virtual number, no POTS line and 3 phones.

I'll look for the middle wires in the new phone jack tomorrow and then connect the corresponding wires into the telco box - hopefully this will work.

Question - hypothetically speaking; if the telco box is wired improperly, how would it have worked before when I had a normal POTS line?

Thanks for your help - this is starting to make sense!!!

Posts: 13 · Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2005 9:00 am Post subject:

Where is the orange pair of wires coming FROM? I'm guessing the TELCO side of the box?

The red and green pair should be equivalent on the top and bottom of the customer side. It usually works where they just give you more screws for more inside-house lines to junction.

How many phone jacks do you have in the house? Since you only have one Vonage line, I'd forget about the black/yellow pair, as that's used for a secondary line. It may be that your original pairs are flipped, or that the Vonage ATA is connected flipped on the Red/Green pair. Take the line that goes to your addition and flip the Red/Green wires. It may just give you tone.

Posts: 19 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 05, 2005 Posts: 19

If the telco box arrangment you listed is right, yellow/green on top then red/black on bottom then your wires are probably not on wrong as I originally suspected. However, the Orange/Orange-white wires do appear to be in the wrong spot. If they are coming from the same cable they should be connected to two separate pins. Possibly your third house phone is connected internally to the other wires somewhere without running all the way to the box?

If the cable from the new addition isn't green/red/yellow/black cabling, it should be the blue/blue-white wires are the two that you'd want to use (if they did it according to standard color coding).

In any case, a digital picture would sure clear things up if not!!

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Mar 04, 2004 Posts: 12

You're a GENIUS!!!! Very Happy

You were exactly correct; the Solid Blue wire corresponds to the Red connection and the Blue-White wire to the Green. Both of which I used since you had mentioned that the "middle" wires on the phone jack are the ones I needed to focus on. I connected them as suggested and JACKPOT - it worked just fine! I won't worry about the orange wires since I have no idea what they are intended for and everything is working perfectly.

Thanks for all your help!!!

BTW, sorry for the delay in responding; I live in Chicago and we got a lot of snow during the week, so I wanted to wait for a warmer day to get in my backyard. Thanks again!

Posts: 19 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 05, 2005 Posts: 19

Congrats, glad it worked for you! Most of my career has been in computers/networking...but I spent some time working in the telco field. It comes in handy once-in-a-while.

Would've been nice if we'd had snow here (central Ohio)...but all's we got stuck with was massive flooding!!