house has 2 phone lines, how to hardwire?

Posts: 10 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Sep 08, 2005 Posts: 10

I just moved to a new house and I want to plug a few phones into the existing jacks since my computer room (VoIP modem) is downstairs.
I went out to the NIU and I have 2 phone lines coming in (each marked with a different number). since I dont now, and have not had, regular phone service hooked up since I got my Vonage service, there is really no way to tell what line goes to what jacks. Sad

Is there a way to 1. either tell what jacks the lines in the NIU serve or 2. wire the lines together so that ALL the jacks in the house are in parallel??

TIA!
Chrys

Posts: 1424 · Posted: Mon Sep 12, 2005 7:48 am Post subject:

Typically in a 2 line system both lines will be available at all jacks. A standard RJ-11 jack supports both line 1 and line 2. Unfortunately some amateurs come in and rewire jacks so that line 2 is on line 1. The easiest fix is to simply correct their mistake.

Determining how your house is wired is dependent on what tools you have available. Phone repairmen have devices called toners. These devices plug into a phone jack and generate a signal on the line. They then can plug a buttset at other jacks or use a probe to inductively search for the tone.

Obviously one way would be to plug your Vonage adapter into a jack and see which jacks are active. You can then look at the color coding on the non-active jacks and see if you can get all of the jacks working.

Since phone wiring is just wires, you can wire a battery to your phone wires and use a multimeter to look for current at the jacks. Lacking a multimeter you could try a flashlight bulb with some spare wire.

Yes, you could make both line one and line two active for the same line. This would involve splicing one wire of each pair together, probably at the NID. That is connect Green to Black and connect Red to Yellow. (Or in newer situations white w/ blue to white w/ orange and blue w/ white to orange w/ white.)

Posts: 10 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Sep 08, 2005 Posts: 10

thanks! I will give that a try!!