Connecting Vonage to exisitng phone jacks

Posts: 217 · Posted: Fri May 27, 2005 1:48 pm Post subject:

Hmmm..I would not have disconnected all the wires from the terminals. Most likely those run to your home phone jacks throughout the house. By disconnecting the swing arm you will separate yourself from the local telco line while still leaving your internal circuit intact.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 7

No good. The swing arms I have are just covers for the screw terminals.

I just wrapped up the wires in electrical tape and it eliminated the feedback noise. After that, I ran around the house testing all the phone jacks.

Only the room down the hall works. There is 1 jack upstairs that doesn't have a dial tone, and 2 downstairs that also don't work.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 7

rlstjohn wrote:

Hmmm..I would not have disconnected all the wires from the terminals. Most likely those run to your home phone jacks throughout the house. By disconnecting the swing arm you will separate yourself from the local telco line while still leaving your internal circuit intact.

I'm seeing if there is something else I can do, my swing arms come off, but they aren't completing a circuit as far as I can tell.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 7

Fixed it.

I had to disconnect the wires from both screw terminals and splice matching color wires together (blue to blue, white to white). Voila! Everythings working and I can give Verizon the finger. Very Happy

Posts: 217 · Posted: Fri May 27, 2005 3:32 pm Post subject:

Cool! It's a great feeling to give Verizon the bird!

Posts: 90 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: May 05, 2005 Posts: 90

There are two problems here.

First, some jackwad connected a zillion wires to two terminals on your phone box. Bad, bad, bad. Screw terminals should never have that many wires attached to them, but telco installers do it all the time.

Each pair of those wires goes to a different jack in your home.

Second, you apparently disconnected all the wires without tying them all together. If you just disconnected them, there no longer is any continuity between all the jacks in your house.

So no wonder you only get service at one or two jacks! Those are the one or two pairs that are still connected together by accident.

Go back outside and take the wad of RED wires and tie them together with some sort of electrical connector. Do the same for the wad of GREEN wires as well.

The problem is, with such a large wad of wires, chances are, one or two are not going to make contact, particularly if you use one of those yellow twisty connectors that is a refugee from a ceiling fan install kit. So check your connections carefully.

Posts: 7 · New Forum Member Joined: May 27, 2005 Posts: 7

robertplattbell wrote:

Go back outside and take the wad of RED wires and tie them together with some sort of electrical connector. Do the same for the wad of GREEN wires as well.

The problem is, with such a large wad of wires, chances are, one or two are not going to make contact, particularly if you use one of those yellow twisty connectors that is a refugee from a ceiling fan install kit. So check your connections carefully.

The red and green wires are on the telco side of the box locked behind a bolt of some kind. The only reason I saw them was because I was trying to see if the swing arms had a contact on them and I was bending the plastic on the box quite a bit.

I connected all the blue wires to each other and did the same with the white ones. I plan on getting an actual communications splicer eventually, but for now they are all connected with mass quantities of electrical tape Very Happy

I know it's not pretty, but all my jacks are now active and I don't have any interference on the line to speak of.

Is there still something I should do with the green and red wires? They're not connected at all to the blue/white wires anymore.

Posts: 90 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: May 05, 2005 Posts: 90

The actual color pair combo varies depending on what kind of wire the installer used.

Red and green are the traditional colors for the primary tip and ring wires for line 1. You only need two wires to run a phone, and these are traditionally those two. If the house is wired for two lines, the second line is usually wired to the black and yellow. If you have three lines (six wire jacks, a rarity these days) it may also have blue and white for line 3.

The actual colors are irrelevant, so long as you have two live wires to each jack, and the polarity is not reversed. IN your case, they used blue and white for the house wiring.

It sounds like you figured out the problem yourself. So long as all your blues are tied together and all your whites are tied together, and they are disconnected from the Network Interface, you should be fine. The main thing is that all the jacks connect to each other.

This is about as complicated as the wiring diagram for a flashlight. Not high tech.

The telco side of your box has the more traditional red/green color pair wires. I'd leave it alone if you have already isolated the network.

As a former technican and EE, I cringe when I see more than 2 or 3 wires on a screw terminal. Screw terminals suck, basically. When you tighten them, they twist the wire, often breaking it at the weak point created by your stripping tool. Putting more than 3-4 wires on a terminal gets dodgy, as they tend to fall off as you tighten the screw, and oftentimes they can break in such a manner that they *appear* to be connected when in fact they are not.

Similarly, when you take a fistfull of wires and try to tie them together with a twistee-cap, odds are that one or two of them won't make a good connection or will make a flakey connection, which will give you conniption fits down the road.

I ran into this with my NIB, where the Bell Atlantic techs had like 10 wires on each terminal. Needless to say, there were a few flakey connections, and as the copper started to corrode, some extensions started having trouble. I ran a single set of wires into my house, where I wired the extensions into a wiring terminal so that there were no more than 2 or 3 wires per screw.

Of course, the fancy way to do it is with one of those punchboard strips like in commercial installations.

Posts: 11 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: May 25, 2005 Posts: 11

Mine was like this also..........
I left the wires connected to the screw terminals and cut the red and green wire on the telco side going to that swing box.

Mine has 3 wires on each terminal.
Can you recommend the best type of connector to splice all 3 wires together to get them off the terminal.

(Does it matter that I cut those wires?)

Posts: 90 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: May 05, 2005 Posts: 90

That will work, too, provided you don't want to connect to the telco anytime soon. If you do, you'll have to reconnect that red and green that you cut.

If the wires are all connected to those screw posts, and it works OK, I'd leave it alone. As we used to say in the lab, "if it works, don't fix it".

Radio Shack has some terminal blocks that allow you to connect one input set of wires to four output sets. I am sure there are other places on-line that could sell you similar stuff. But most of that is for indoor use, and you'd have to pull all those lines inside (as I did) and connect them there. Big PITA if it is already working the way you have it.

But like I said, if it is working, leave it alone. 10 sets of wires on one pair of screw terminals is not optimal, but it can be done.....

I use a primitive local phone system, so each extension is wired into a separate jack when then connects to the phone via a short RJ-11C jumper wire. I installed a network interface box inside next to this so I could more easily connect and disconnect the system if required. This NIB then connects via a single set of wires to the telco NIB outside.

This pix is of the system which is located under a desk in my office.

The nice thing about the phone system is that is has inputs for four lines, so it automatically "isolates" the phone system from the telco without any wiring changes (other than plugging the Vonage line into one of the inputs of the phone system). It looks a little messy, but it works.......