How To: Distribute VoIP Throughout Your Home
That obnoxious Vonage song finally got to you and you’ve decided to make the switch from traditional phone service to VoIP. You’ve got the VoIP adapter, you’ve got the phones, you’ve got the service provider and you’ve cancelled your phone service. Now what? Before you plug in your VoIP adapter and start making phone calls you’re going to have to do a little rewiring of the telephone circuits in your home. Don’t worry, it’s nothing too complicated, but there are a few simple adjustments that will need to be made in order to prevent damaging your equipment.
Of course, you could just hire a professional to come out and make the necessary adjustments but, if you are strapped for cash, don’t want to wait or just want to learn something new, here is what you will need to do.
Learn The Basics
The biggest obstacle that you will face when switching from traditional phones to VoIP is changing the telephone wiring inside your home. It may sound daunting but it is actually a pretty easy process made easier if your home was built in the last half-century and easier still if it was built in the last decade or so.
Before you start tearing out your phone jacks, cutting random phone wires and connecting them to other wires it’s important to know what you are doing. You probably don’t know anything about wiring a telephone system but don’t worry, because you don’t by any means need to be an electrician or an expert to figure out how to make these small adjustments.
Modern Homes: Telephone service is provided over a pair of wires. You’d be hard-pressed to find a home built in the last 50 years that doesn’t have at least two pairs of wires for the telephone lines. However, this does not mean that the wiring is suitable for two phone lines.
Each phone line is connected to a pair of wires usually consisting of a solid colored wire twisted together with a white wire. The white wire will probably have a stripe running its length that will coincide with the solid color wire that it is paired with. The standard is to use the blue wire twisted with the white wire (with a blue stripe) as the primary pair or “Line 1.” Any further lines will generally be set up with “Line 2” on the orange pair, “Line 3” on the green pair, “Line 4” on the brown pair and “Line 5” (if that’s a possibility) on the gray pair. Newer homes will likely have either Cat (short for category) 5 or Cat 3 wire. Cat 5, which is the most common, contains four pairs of wires while Cat 3 can hold different amounts of pairs (usually between three and six). The outer jacket of the wiring can come in a range of colors but blue is popular for Cat 5.
Older Homes: If your home has been around for a decade or longer you may find a completely different setup. “Quad” wiring contains four wires colored red, green, yellow and black. The red and green wires generally make up the primary phone line and sometimes the yellow and black will be utilized as “Line 2.” However, the use of “quad” wiring for more than one line can cause “crosstalk” between the two lines because the wire pairs are not twisted together. For this same reason, “quad” wiring is also more prone to pick up radio frequency interference from nearby transmitters. If you find “quad” wiring in your home you will want to seriously consider replacing it with Cat 5 wiring. This is when you might want to consult a professional.
Really Old Homes: If your home was built more than 50 years ago then you might find two or three wires twisted together with the same dark-color insulation and no outer jacket. If the wires are still working, the insulation is in good shape and you just don’t want to deal with replacing it all, then you can probably leave them alone for now and use what you have. But, if the wires are insulated with rubber, you will need to replace them because the insulation is likely to crack and crumble with any disturbance. Once again, if you need to rewire the house, seek professional assistance.
Various Wires: Any non-standard wire (doorbell wire, lamp cord, speaker cable, antenna wire, stranded wire, etc…) that is being used as telephone wiring needs to be replaced with Cat 5 wiring. Telephone wire should be solid copper. Say it with me now – if you don’t know how to rewire your home, seek professional help.
Connectors: You will likely not need to splice any wires together but if you need to for any reason, don’t use wire nuts. They do not make a secure connection and will allow moisture into the splice corroding the copper. Only approved communication connectors should be used for connecting wires. Gel-filled, moisture-resistant connectors are available and vital if the wires will be outdoors or exposed to excessive moisture. Make sure to clip off any bare copper ends when using these connectors so that all of the wires are completely insulated.
Disconnect From The Phone Company
Now that you know what kind of wiring to look for it’s time to proceed outside and disconnect the phone company’s line from your inside wiring. Even if the line appears to be dead, it’s important to disconnect it because any kind of power that makes it into the phone lines in your home can ruin your VoIP equipment.
Network Interface Unit: The Network Interface Unit (NIU) is the demarcation point between your wiring and the phone company’s wiring. This is the most common connection these days and will consist of a metal box mounted to the side of your house with a phone line running to it from the street. Open the box and you will find one or more sets of screw terminals and short stubs of wire with a standard telephone plug on the end. Unplug all of the plugs and wrap the ends with black electrical tape. It is important to leave the ground wire connected to protect your home from lightning strikes.
Make sure to warn the phone company not to reconnect these lines. You can leave a note on the wires themselves or leave a sign on the inside or outside of the NIU.
Plugless Network Interface Unit: If your NIU is missing plugs then you are dealing with a newer model. For this type of unit you will need to disconnect the wires directly from underneath the screw terminals. If there is bare copper at the end of the wires clip it off so that the whole wire is insulated. After the wires are disconnected, you will need to splice them all together away from the screw terminals using an approved connector. Obviously, if there is only one wire, then you will not need to do any splicing and you can just wrap the end of the wire with electrical tape (after it is disconnected) and leave it in there.
Lightning Protectors: Before the NIU there was the lightning protector. If you find one of these then, similar to the plugless NIU, you will have to physically disconnect the wires from the screw terminals. There will be two large black wires leading from the street to the lightning protector. These are the phone company’s wires and you will need to leave them connected along with the ground, which should be connected to a third terminal in the middle of the unit. This will help protect your home from lightning strikes.
You will only need to disconnect the wires (usually smaller and colored red and green) that lead into your home. Be advised that not all of these are wired the same so if you need to do any splicing be sure to remember what wires go together.
New Home Or Remodel
There are a couple of things to keep in mind if you have a new or remodeled home without a NIU. Always use Cat 5 wiring or better when running new wire, keep your phone wiring as far away as possible from electrical wiring to prevent interference and run a wire from each phone jack to a central location inside your home instead of a NIU. Also, a builder will generally leave a stub of phone cable hanging outside where the NIU would be installed. If you can, pull this wire back inside the house to keep it out of the elements.
Connect VoIP
After you have disconnected the power from the phone company use a regular corded phone to check for signs of life. If you hear any noise get a phone technician to your home to check the inside wiring. If you have dead silence then you are ready to proceed. All you have to do is plug your VoIP telephone adapter into any phone jack in the home, connect standard phones to other jacks and you are wired for VoIP. However, now that your home is VoIP activated there are a few other systems that may need some attention.
Alarm Systems
Many alarm systems will not work in conjunction with VoIP. Before you plug in your VoIP adapter, make sure that you’re home alarm is compatible or you could damage both systems. Some alarm companies will make necessary adjustments for VoIP wiring but your best option is to choose a company that does their monitoring through a broadband connection.
TiVo, ReplayTV, Dish Network, DirecTV
You may not have a problem but, if you do, there are a couple of things that you can do to make TiVo, ReplayTV, Dish Network and DirecTV work well with your VoIP network. You can connect an inline DSL filter backwards to the device in question or disable your call waiting. You can also try to adjust the data transmission speed to the slowest setting possible or, as with some TiVo units, you can use them through a broadband connection and bypass the VoIP system altogether. If none of these work, you can contact your VoIP provider and they may be able to change some of the settings on their end to make things work properly.
Too Many Ringers
There may be a limitation on the number of ringers that your VoIP adapter can support. To find out how many ringers you can have turn all of your phone ringers off and have somebody call you. Turn on each ringer one by one until they are all on, start to get quieter or don’t work at all. If you need to ring more phones than your VoIP adapter will support there are ring boosters available through companies such as Viking Electronics and Mike Sandman Enterprises.
Wiring An Apartment Or Condo
Everything we have talked about to this point assumes that you are living in a single-family dwelling. If you reside in an apartment or condo, you will not be able to undo any wiring inside the NIU because other people will be using the same unit. You will have to instead find the place where the outside wires make their way inside your apartment and break the connection there. However, this can be a risky gamble because you cannot be sure that someone will not come along and reconnect the wires. Your safest bet would be to get a cordless phone and plug it straight into the adapter.
For more in depth information check out How To Distribute VoIP Throughout A Home.
Original post by Staff
