How to wire your home for VOIP the right way!

[HDTV101]

This is a great page done up by Michigan Telephone thats just full of good information if you're doing your own home VOIP wiring setup or a cut-a-way from Bell.

http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html

[Darkman00]

Nice looking link..
Thanks...

[sheepoo]

Marvelous! . Could not be better than this

[hugh]

Great link. I'll stick this for awhile since it's getting to be a common question.

[Bluebird]

Hi Guys:

If you lived in western canada, you might also want to take a look of the following document.

http://www.telus.com/downloads/wiring_guide.pdf

Hey, it is from Telus...

Hope it help

- Bluebird

[djino]

Any guide to wiring an appartment unit (if its possible)? :P

[jdsharp]

Originally Posted by djino

Any guide to wiring an appartment unit (if its possible)? :P

Apartments are wired in different ways I've come across the following.
1. Multiple wires come up a to a common location from the basement and is then distributed throughout the rest of your apartment by red/green line 1 and yellow/black line 2 (if you are lucky )
2. Each jack in your aparment has multiple wires coming up from the basement and there is no gaurentee that you will have the same coloured pair of wires in each room.
3. A shared wall is used for jacks in adjoining rooms.

In the case of #1 it is often the living room or kitchen, if you disconnect the TELCO pair of wires going to your local (1-3 pair) wires you effectively make it difficult for the next person to arrive to get phone service. Also if your building has an old door intercom you may lose the ability to answer the door unless you are hooking up line 2 or leave one phone plugged in at this location.
(if the building needs to know your phone number for the intercom to work the above would not apply to you)

In the case of #2 If you attempt to re-wire your own jacks you risk disconnecting someone else or later have the telephone company disconnect your 2nd line or apply voltage to your VoIP adaptor.

You are always better off using a cordless (900 Mhz works well) with your VoIP service and make sure the phone has a battery backup or is plugged into the same UPS (Uninteruptible Power Supply) as your Router and Adapater are plugged into.

[nodnub]

I've heard that using a cordless phone doesn't work very well with VOIP. That's because the 900MHz (or whatever) signal is processed and compressed over the wireless link to the base station, and then the VOIP signal is compressed even further over the VOIP network.

nodnub

[djino]

I've never heard of such. I have 2 cordless phones that I'm using with my voip service and I haven't noticed any less quality in service.

Anyone else feel the same?

[james99]

I only use cordless phones and all is well.

[classicsat]

Most 900 mhz phones are analog (I am pretty sure ours is; a nearly 3 or 4 year old Uniden), so will have no effect whatsoever.

[MarcP]

Originally Posted by nodnub

I've heard that using a cordless phone doesn't work very well with VOIP.

I have a dual-handset 5.8GHz phone and it works flawlessly. In fact, I even wired my Vonage adapter to the home alarm before the signal gets to the phone and it's still working fine.

[prdufresne]

Originally Posted by classicsat

Most 900 mhz phones are analog (I am pretty sure ours is; a nearly 3 or 4 year old Uniden), so will have no effect whatsoever.

Be careful with that statement. I have 2 900Mhz DSS (Digital Spread Spectrum) cordless telephones. There are also a number of 2.4G analog phones out there. Don't confuse the frequency with transmission technology.

It should also be noted that many QUALITY digital telephones that use DSS don't use any compression at all, but spread the signal over several frequencies. If you have a lot of 2.4G devices in or around your home (cordless phones, wireless LAN, wireless mouse, Bluetooth, etc) your 2.4G phone will have interference issues on one or more of the frequencies affecting signal, and therefore voice quality.

The more likely cause of the problem with digital cordless telephones is over processing, not compression. Simply, you have an analog signal (speaker and microphone on the handset) that are converted to digital to transmit over wireless which are then converted back to analog to pass on to the phone line which is really a port on your VOIP gateway which then takes that signal, digitizes it, compresses, packetizes it, sends it over the Internet with unpredictable delay, packet loss and jitter. Once the packets reach Vonage/Rogers or whoever they are reassembled, decompressed and sent over a digital telephone network to the other caller where it is converted back into an analog signal, or worse, back to IP, then back to analog, and over to another cordless phone at the far end.

The point is, each conversion along the path degrades the voice quality to some extent, so the more conversions that are introduced (even without compression) the more voice quality will be degraded.

BTW: Hi! I'm new here.

[kymics]

I have my Primus TBB kit now and I'll be setting it up this week. I've read Primus' explanation of how to get all the phones in your house to work with VOIP, and I've skimmed over the sticky link on this forum. Unfortunately I'm stuck in my tracks before I even get started.

Last week, I went to try and open my Network Interface Unit outside (MTS) and what appeared to be a simple bolt, I am not able to unscrew. The bolt is inset in the plastic of the NIU cover and any sockets that fit in the hole are too small for the bolt, but the socket that would be the right size for the bolt won't go inside the hole.

I'm assuming this is some sort of trick used by the phoneco to keep people from playing around with the boxes, but can someone suggest a way for me to open it up without resorting to a) having MTS come and open it for me, or b) using a sledgehammer

Thanks!

[classicsat]

Of the Bell NID I am familiar with, there is a screw half and bolt half. You are only permitted to access the screw half, which has a telephone jack inside, connected to the telco line. You just need to unplug the plug plugged into it, and tape up the plug, and backfeed your VOIP into your phone wiring.