Vonage Tip #6: How to make your Vonage connection house-wide

(2 minute read)

By design, the Vonage Phone adapter has two phone jacks with the “Line 1” jack enabled. The “standard” way to connect your phone is to simply plug it into the jack on the Phone adapter. You are now using Vonage’s service, and couldn’t be happier, right. But what if you have more than one phone in your house? Read on for some information on how to connect all of your home phones…

One method is to add a “splitter” to the jack on the back of the Phone Adapter and plug in a second phone.

That’s fine, but it certainly won’t help if you have more phones or phones located in other rooms.

Another method is to plug your…

Wait a minute. First and foremost, before we go on, you need to know one very important thing: You should ONLY plug your VOnage (or any VoIP) Phone Adapter into one of your home’s phone jacks if, and only if you have disconnected the Local Phone Company’s line from your inside wiring! If you do not do this, you could damage your Phone adapter! OK, that said, let’s continue…

Another method is to disconnect the Local Phone Company’s line from your house and then plug your Vonage Phone Adapter into an open phone jack. Assuming your home phone wiring is done properly, your home phone wiring is wired in parallel. “Connecting a dial tone” to one jack should provide a dial tone to all jacks. So, if you disconnect the Local Phone Company’s dial tone from the wiring and connect your Vonage Phone Adapter, it will provide a dial tone “house-wide”.

I’m not going to go into all the specific details about how to do the Local Phone Compnay disconnection and the Vonage connection. Instead, I refer you to an excellent online resource at:

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

This “How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home” page details some telephone basics, how to disconenct your Local Phone Company’s line, how to prevent your Local Phone Company from re-connecting it, and some other fascinating and technical telephone-related information. It is truely a “must read” page!

Obviously, your individual situation will dictate how you connect the Vonage service. For example, if you live in s studio apartment, maybe a single phone connected to the Phone Adapter is sufficient. Maybe your setup requires a whole-house connection. Like so many things about Vonage, you have some flexibility to determine how to set things up for your situation.