phone jacks no longer work with vonage

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

phatjd,

thanks for the reply. I made a mistake when I said the first pair is red and black. The first pair is red and green hence your top left and right are red and green. This is your first pair. I can see that by the fact that you have two wires of each color, they have been connected in sequence (i.e. phone wire comes into first jack, second wire goes from first jack and connects to second jack in sequence and so on until all the jacks have been connected in sequence so it is not a star pattern installation.

If all four jacks have the exact same wires connected, then they are all on the same phone line. Now that we have that settled, why don't you connect the router to a jack in BR1 and connect a phone into the jack of BR2. The phone jacks should be in a fairly logical sequence. Are your BRs in a circular configuration or are they in a straight line? If in a circular configuration, then they are connected in a clockwise or counter clockwise order. If a straight line then it is obvious which next BR jack would be connected.

Don't worry about the basement jack for now. You can tell if a jack is on a second line if the red/green wire is replaced or switch with the black/yellow combination. But since all the red/green wires are at the top of the jacks, it appears to me that they are all connected to a single line.

The goal here is to find which jack is next in sequence and try the two jacks that are next to each other which means there is only one set of wires between them. Hence the chances are good that it will work.

If the BR2 jack doesn't work, then try BR3 with the phone. Then BR4.

If none of them work, then now move the router to BR2 and the phone to BR3 and then to BR4.

If none of these work either, then move the router to BR3 and then plug the phone into BR4.

If none of them work, then something really bad happened to your wires.

I am assuming above that the BRs are connected in sequence. You will need to tell us what configuration they are in.

I hope this helps, mundy5.

ps The above solution will only work if BR1-4 are indeed in order.

Posts: 16 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Mar 31, 2005 Posts: 16

Good luck trying to figure out what happened. Same thing happened to me. Mine worked for 4 days then stopped. About 2 weeks later it started working again. This time it worked for about 2 months then last Thursday (June 16) it stopped again. I have given up. Have my phones plugged directly into the router now. They work better that way anyway. It is my suspicion that there is something Vonage does to their cofiguration, maybe a firmware download, that does not allow the router to work with the inside wiring.

Hope you get it working again and figure out what happened.

Jeff

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

phatjd,

Something similar happened to me the other day when my jacks failed. I had recently added a Coax cable connection in combination with my phone jack.

It turned out that as I reconnected the phone wiring, I had accidently tightened it too much and it actually severed my green wire connection. So when I opened up the jack faceplate, and looked at all my phone wiring, I noticed that the green one was disconnected.

But once I fixed that it was back up with no problems. I realize that one has to be very careful with these tiny little wires, they get severed very easily if you overtighten the terminals.

I hope you have made some progress.

I would recommend opening up the jacks and lightly tugging at the wires to see if they stay connected.

mundy5

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Jun 22, 2005 Posts: 1

The same thing happened to me. Everything was working fine on my home wired jacks, then the jacks quit working for about 18 hours (even though the direct connected phone remained working), then they came back. I couldn't do anything that fixed the situation. Has anyone solved this ghost issue?