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Distributing VoIP Throughout Your Home, Part 3
Friday, April 18, 2008
If you've read the previous two articles, you've found your Network Interface Device (NID) or demarc and you've managed to get yourself disconnected from the PSTN. The next step is to figure out how the wiring is done in your house.
There are two common methods, and unfortunately, they're often both used within the same house. The first method is what they call a "star" or "home run" method. Wires run from a central point--sometimes at the demarc, sometimes to a different location--to the locations where the phone jacks are. This is the preferred method.
The other method, used in older homes, is called the series or daisy-chain method. One line runs from the demarc into your house. Each telephone jack is simply daisy-chained into the next one until you get to the end of the chain. Note that the star method also employs the series method to a certain extent, but the daisy chain is limited to a specific area of the house.
Regardless of the method, as long as all of the wiring connects to a single place, and as long as you are disconnected from the PSTN network, you should be able to plug in your analog telephone adapter to any available telephone jack. Congratulations, your voice over IP service is on every phone in the house.
On the other hand, you can avoid the house wiring issues entirely by switching to one of those cordless systems with multiple handsets. This is what I ended up doing in my new house. In addition to eliminating wiring from the equation, you can also benefit from features like handset-to-handset paging.
These last three articles give you a rough overview of the process of hooking all your analog telephone handsets to a voice over IP provider. However, there are intricacies and details that I'm sure I left out. If you are at all serious about doing this, I highly recommend the detailed tutorial by Michigan Telephone.
