Monday, February 06, 2006

My Parent's House Network Setup:Voip + Internet

Until about 2 years ago my parents house still had dial up..it figured that of course they waited until my brothers and I moved out to get Broadband. I still remember coming over with my laptop and jumping on the neighboors wireless.. So now they had this broadband connection that wasnt being used that much, so I convinced them to get a Vonage line, and after it passed the "test" My dad decided to switch their second home line to Vonage as well and had been bugging me about it for a while. So this weekend I called Vonage to transfer the existing phone number and when I mentioned the setup we wanted they didnt seem to have a clue on what I was talking about. After attempting to explain it to 3 different people in the Sales /Support/ Tech Support dept I decided to take matters into my own hands...after all I did take that NexTone Certification course. The issue was converting this second traditional phone line to a Vonage phone line but how would we get it to all the rooms that were plugged into the wall or cordless on different phones / cordless phone systems? The existing Vonage line they have is only on one particular cordless phone system (Base station in basement and second handset in main level)
All the other extensions/rooms had either a wired phone or cordless but not all the same. So I went down to the office where the Vonage box is and my bulb went off when I saw their media box HUB (which is a box on newer homes that has the entire house's cable/phone wiring) and the solution was right there under my nose! All I did was I unplugged the incoming line (verizon local phone) and replaced it with line One coming from the vonage box(Port 1) and whooala!!! we got VoIP phone lines all over the house now. So Vonage Line one will remain plugged in to existing Cordless phone system. Phone line #2 which is being brought over to Vonage will be on port 2 and plugged in from the Vonage box to the Phone line in on the Media center which distributes it to the rest of the house. Here is a pic of the setup I drew up to explain it to my Dad who was just happy I wasnt cursing at the Vonage reps anymore. If you have any questions on the setup let me know.

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