Switching phone lines...

I live in a fifty year old home and have two phone lines in my home at the moment...

one ending in 4793 (main line with many jacks throughout the house)
the other ending in 0784 (secondary line with only one jack used primarily for dial-up internet service)

I recently tried to switch the main line (4793) to a different phone company to get DSL service and had planned to drop the second line (0784) altogether.

I experienced problems in the switch over that are too numerous to mention here, but as a result I was forced to have service to the main line (4793) disconnected. The secondary line is still connected and working fine, but as I noted earlier it works with only one jack in my house.

I now plan to just keep the 0784 number as my main number, but would like to know how to switch the wiring at the network interface box so that what is now coming through to only one jack will now work on all the jacks throughout my house.

Thanks...
Anne (unplugged44)

 

Switchthe connections at the network interface device.

 

Yep, the easiest thing to do is move the wires from the second block in the NID to the first block in the NID - usually they will be marked with the phone number. However, if they are not marked, more than likely the block with the most wires will be the first number.

If you want more info on how phone lines and NID's are wired and how they work, take a look at http://phonewiring.safewatchservice.com

Good luck!

 

The other posters suggested switching the wires in the NID -- however, that will activate the jacks with more wires, and deactivate the single jack. A better solution would be to connect both wires together on the non-network side in the NID. Then both sets of jacks will be active.

There is no problem connecting the 2 sets of wires together -- just be sure to connect the like colors together, it will be easier if changes need to be made at a future date.

 

I don't understand how you summized that - what we recommended was to move the wires from one block in the NID (a "block" representing a phone number) to the other block. Namely, the wires from the first block (or first phone number - 4793) need to be moved to the second block (0784) - wire colors have no baring here (altough I did have it backwards in my first post.) They could be wired on either the Red/Green pair or the Black/Yellow pair (or Cat5's Blue/White or Orange/White.)

This will basically disconnect the first number from any of the jacks in the house and change those jacks to the second number. I may be wrong, but I thought that is what unplugged44 wanted to do?

 

I stand corected. I read the post quickly, and when I saw "switch" I understood it to mean taking the inside wiring from one line to the other (A to B, and B to A). Moving the inside wires over to the other line -- I agree with.

I was also assuming that there were 2 independant lines in the house, not a situation where the lines were split -- a pair used for one line with the other pair used for the other line, which is the usual way that an aditional line is added to existing house wiring. However, I am not sure if that was the case, or if he had a separate line and jack run to the office, in which case he may have had complete wire set to each set of jacks -- in any case that was the basis for my answer.

I stand corrected, and hope that Anne (unplugged44) gets things fixed.