Dear Ma Bell,
We've been together for a long time, but we think it's time for us to take a break up. It's just... we met someone else; someone who will hook us up with free long distance. But don't worry, we'll give you a call sometime next year when we're looking for faster internet.In today's How-To, we're taking the diagonal cutters to the Ma Bell umbilical cord and hooking up our voice over IP adapter so we can use our old phone jacks. No soldering irons or caustic acid required. This time.
For today's How-To, you'll probably need:
- Screwdriver, pliers, wire cutters
- Extra phone wires
- Splice connectors (optional)
- VoIP Adapter
The idea for this one is pretty easy. We'll visit the ugly box that Ma Bell graciously left on the side of every single building, ever. Inside it, we'll cut the leash and take control. Back inside, we'll hook up our handy VoIP adapter so we can use the existing phone jacks that run all over the house.
Most phones get power from the phone line, so there is a limit to the number of phones you can connect to a VoIP adapter. Your mileage will vary, but you'll probably be able to use three phones with the average adapter. If you've got lots of voltage sucking phones, then you might want to pick up a
ring booster.
We'll be semi-violating this warning label. If you connected it to the wall now, the voltage from the phone line would probably do something bad to it. Before hooking anything up a trip to the telephone companies box is in order.
Our typical access box. There's usually some sort of customer access area. In this case, we have to loosen a screw and the cover pops open.
[Update: If you don't mind going into the telco side of the box, you can probably disconnect the line without cutting]
Proper application of a screwdriver (or a dime) gains access to this rat's nest.
The module pops open to reveal some color coded screws. Since our VoIP line will be the primary phone, we're disconnecting the red and green leads. Since some lazy tech didn't connect everything, we had to splice together the two sets of red and green wires. Normal phone wiring has two pairs. If you're keeping your regular line, or have DSL on it, the yellow and black wires are the pair to use for a secondary line throughout the house.
The rebel inside is gonna enjoy this part. Sure we could have unscrewed the terminals, but snipping those cables was more fun. If you leave any wire attached, make sure they aren't shorted. Most phone companies leave out of service phone lines powered.
Inside the box, two of the wires were terminated at the screw terminals. To complete the internal network, they need to be spliced together. We used standard weatherproof splice connectors available from any hardware store. To attach them, just insert the
unstripped wires and squeeze down the circle with a pair of pliers.
The wiring is completed. The first line is disconnected, and the remaining leads are now spliced together. Now, the center pair of wires of all the phone jacks are connected to create in internal phone network.
Our packet8 adapter just has three ports on the back. The Ethernet goes to our router, and now it's safe to connect the phone jack to a wall outlet inside the house. Now our VoIP adapter can live happily on our server rack, where it gets a UPS, and delivers phone service to the rest of our house through a pre-existing phone jack.
Bye, Ma. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
posted June 20th 2006 10:39PM
Hello. Just wanted to add my 2 cents worth here. As an employee in the telecommunications industry, I can say that VoIP is *not* going to bankrupt any of the big telco providers anytime soon. Mainly because they all provide internet access, as well, through DSL or T1 (or E1 in Europe). In some areas, you can't get Cable, but you can get DSL (and in some areas it's reversed.) So, if you have DSL and want to use this method, take all of the filters off of your phones and put the splitter filter out in the NIJ outside. Wire the black-yellow pairs to the "DSL" side of the filter and plug the filter into the "test jack" from the telco. Then, you can leave the green-red pairs connected or your can cut them as per this article, it won't matter because they are no longer connected to the telco, since you removed them when you plugged the filter directly into the test jack. Once this is done, you *might* have to rewire whichever jack your DSL modem is on to use the black-yellow pair for the DSL modem, or your modem might simply recognize the swap-over and continue to work. That depends on the model of your DSL modem.
An alternative method to the black-yellow is to use the red-green pair of the cable going to the DSL modem for the PC side of the filter, if you know which cable it is. This is the *best* method, but not the easiest as it assumes your know something about the wiring in your house or have a lineman's tone and probe for tracing out wiring.
Now, for those of you who have plugged directly into the phone jacks without unhooking from your telco provider, watch out for spurious current from the telco. More often than not, even though you've called and had your service turned off, the line is still connected through their SLICs until they need that port for someone else. Also, if a lightning strike hits your telephone cabling outside, it could travel down the line and straight into your ATA and *could* travel through the ATA and into your network. It's best to remove the umbilical if you are going to go VoIP. In the future, if you sell your home, the telco will rehook the homewiring up. It's their job. Anyone telling you otherwise is a lazy telco worker. :)
Undrhil
As interesting as this might sound, isn't this illegal?
I know you have LIMITED access to the gray box to add additional phone jacks., but cutting the lines from the street to your home requires access to the restricted section of the box and isn't that destruction of private property as in Telephone company property?
And what about the fact that you can only use up to 3-telephones., my home alone has 15-phones., i'm not planning to loose 12-telephones just to gain free long distance.
My ISP/DSL and whole phone service comes from one of MaBell's Southern Children any advice how to get another ISP/DSL to replace them? Is not as simple as it sounds. I'm sure they will not let me go without some sort of penalty even after 15-years. Muchless if i cut out their lines.
Everything in the how-to is all on the customer access side.
One thing that isn't mentioned here is that you will lose land-line emergency service. I don't know about all VOIP services, but there are some that do not have 911 support. If your power or network is dead a you won't be able to dial 911 even if your VOIP service has it. You also cannot contact your power company in the event of an outage like you can with a regular land line phone. If you have a cell phone that you keep charged this is a great idea, but if you rely on the landline for emergency service, then don't do it.
As far as the wiring in your home is concerned, the info presented here is correct. Variations will exist from home to home...you'll have to deal with that. If you don't get it, reread the instructions...everything you need to know is already here.
There ARE some errors or misconceptions in some of the postings. Voice quality is and always will be better over a land line than it will over VoIP (notice, I said "voice" quality - not music, etc.) if all parts of it are working properly. The reason is simply because the land line network was designed specifically to care voice signals. As such, that network was designed to carry signals between 300 Hz and 3000 Hz (the dynamic range of the average human voice). This is done over 64 Kb of bandwidth. Why is 64K the magic number? Because of Nyquist's Theorem (Google it), which states that any signal sampled at twice the highest expected rate of the signal can be accurately reproduced. Therefore, the phone company (giving you a little extra slack) assumes the highest frequency signal you can speak is 4 KHz, and samples your voice at an 8 KHz rate, each sample is 8 bits of data - 8000 samples per second X 8 bit samples = 64Kb. This is called PCM or Pulse Code Modulation. (BTW: that's still the technique used by G.711)
An aside: someone knowledgable posted that it's really only 56Kb - he wasn't exactly wrong. When T1 circuits first came into use (downtown Chicago, IL, USA), somebody said something like, "hey, we can't use all 64Kb for voice - we need to pass some signalling information on that circuit as well", so... something called Robbed Bit Signalling was invented! This was an algorithym where by every 8th bit of the voice signal could be 'robbed' and used for signalling purposes (without degrading the voice quality). As PRI circuits replaced T1 circuits the need to use Robbed Bit Signaling went away. What's a PRI, what's a T1? The phone circuit delivered to your home is an analog phone circuit (none of this digitizing has taken place until the signal gets to the phone company's equipment), as soon as your signal hits the phone company's equipment, at the CO, (Central Office) they do the PCM encoding, because the digital signals are easier to deal with then a bunch of analog signals (anyone remember cord boards?). The CO is a digital (in almost all parts of the USA) switch that decides how to route your call. When the CO finds a bunch of calls going in the same general direction as your call, it 'bundles' or more precisely, 'multiplexes' your call with those calls and passes them along to the next CO. That 'bundle' is a T1 or a PRI. A T1 is 24 channels of 64Kb PCM encoded voice. A T1 'robs' 8Kb from each channel for signalling purposes. A PRI is also 24 channels of 64Kb, but in the case of a PRI only 23 channels are used for voice and the 24th channel carries all the signalling information for the other 23 channels. So, long story short... land lines today are indeed 64Kb.
BTW: E1 (the standard used in Europe)is similar to T1, but a little better at using bandwidth. The E1 standard came after the T1, so they had the advantage of learning from our mistakes. ;-)
In contrast, a G.711 VoIP call consumes 256Kb of bandwidth. Do the math, that's 4 times the bandwidth of a land line! Why did I specify G.711, what the hell is G.711 anyway? G.711 specifies how a VoIP call may be encoded. This particular encoding method is the equivalent of a land line, that is; an uncompressed, PCM encoded signal. In a 'perfect network' (no congestion and no latency) it should sound as good as a land line. It is 'probably NOT the encoding method used by your VoIP provider. Other encoding methods are employed which reduce the bandwidth requirements, but these algorithyms 'compress' the signal, much like the algorithyms you choose from when you convert an audio CD to MP3 format. No compression algorithym is 'completely' lossless, so if you use one, you DO lose something. About the lowest that you can reduce VoIP bandwidth requirements, with the various compression techniques, is 115Kb per voice call.
So if VoIP bandwidth requirements are so great, why does this technology make any sense at all? It's a game of statisics - when you got your 64K channel from the phone company it was all yours, all the time, the whole time you were on your call... BUT, you weren't using it all! A large part of any phone coversation is the transmission of silence - either yours, or the party you are speaking to. Land lines transmit silence, VoIP calls do not. You may need 256k of upload bandwidth when you are actually speaking, but none when you are not, so...the bandwidth you are not using gets used by someone else and everything works out fine in the end. ;-)
So VoIP vs. land line??? Got news for you... If you have used a land line to make a long distanse phone call anytime in the last few years, YOU have already used VoIP! These telcos that you hate...they have already been using VoIP equipment to move calls from one end of the country to the other for several years - you never noticed because THEY do it SO well!!! That 'perfect' network I mentioned earlier - they have it, they own it! (Someone mentioned QOS earlier - when you control the whole network, is the only way that it can work effectively.) Their competitors are trying to duplicate what they have already mastered. How do I know? I worked in the R&D lab that designed the equipment that they bought.
Who do you think invented VoIP??? It was the telecommunications industry. Will you put people out of work by switching to VoIP? Yes, but we already knew that. The telecommunictions industry has been working towards this end for some time now... long before you heard about it. It was/is the natural progresion of technology.
One day (in the not too distant future), your ISP and your VoIP provider will be the same company. You will not have 'phone' jacks in your house any longer, you will have data jacks to which you (at your whim) will connect either a PC or a SIP phone at any time you like (or some other Internet Appliance). That day is coming, and it's coming sooner than you think. In the meantime...by all means use Vonage or use Skype if you like...whatever saves you money and gets the job done. It will only drive the big telcos to do better and quicker. Do your self a favor...take a look at non-branded SIP phones and open source VoIP switches like asterisk.org
The power and alarm caveats should be heeded, but are fixable.
I just recently bought a brand new house, so the VoIP was a snap. I just bought a WEATHER-TIGHT outside box, spliced all of the Cat3 cables together (there were 3) and plugged my Vonage into one of the less noticable jacks.
Since I am IT for a large bank and have required home access, the bank has provided me with a very large UPS to keep my cable modem, etc. going in the event of a short power failure. When I recover from the 1st round of "new home" expenses (re: pay my AMEX bill), a generator will be the next thing on the list. I will buy enough of a generator to supply the 'fridge, HVAC, and computer gear at the minimum.
As far as the Security goes, ADT has a cellular option for the alarm, it just costs a bit more per month and $150.00 to install.
BTW, my bank is replacing most all of the metro T1 lines with fiber access from the cable company. We have 2 branches (out of 15) that have T1 lines that bounce up and down EVERY TIME it rains. The telco tells us, "if we fix your lines we have to fix everyone in the general area". Like it's our problem their lines are old and bad.
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I use SKYPE a lot. I have a 3-line, 9-extension PBX phone system at home that allows me to use other phone jacks for analog phones. I was able to connect ATT VOIP to one of those phone jacks in the past and all jacks in the house were activated. What adapter would allow me to connect my SKYPE to my Home phone system?
Thanks for the input.
Smoke_Dawg_187 I see your point, but if phone companies didn't charge so much there would be no need for VoIP. Anyway it didn't work for me. What should I do next?
Walmart is Sam Wal, talking from the after life. He plays it the same way with his help!
Thanks for this excellent post. I recently switched to at&t's Callvantage service and their instructions did not cover the "lazy tech" scenario and the need to splice the wires. It only said to disconnect the wires. That's $100+ Ma Bell's Inside Wiring Dept. is not getting from me.
If you want to know how to make free calls worldwide.You can check out http://voipguides.blogspot.com
Hello All:
After exhaustive experimentation and searching for the right way to utilize my home's entire wiring for my VoIP service, I found a company that markets adapter kits to do just this...I installed it with ease and the polarity is now correct. The site is www.bonwire.net
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Jimmy
PS: Polarity is still important dudes!!!