[madbrain]

I'm new to VOIP so this may be a FAQ, but so far I didn't find any answer .

I have a townhouse with analog phones on two different floors in 5 rooms (master bedroom, 2 home offices, living room, kitchen) and fax in two of them, all on one single analog line. I use DSL (6mbps/768) and the DSL modem & router (supporting DHCP/NAT) is in one of the room upstairs. I have gigabit ethernet wired (along walls ...) to 3 of the 5 rooms.

I'd like to connect all the analog phones / fax / modems to a VOIP line. I would prefer not to change the analog phone equipment to save costs. In particular in one home office I have a nice polycom conference phone. On the living room downstairs I have an answering machine, and there must be an answering machine there. I do not want to modify any of the inside wiring due to the very high labor cost where I live - I'm not a heavy phone user, and having to do that would negate any savings I would ever get from switching to VOIP.

My question is, if I have ethernet connections everywhere needed, can I purchase multiple VOIP / analog phone adapters for each room, and use them all with the same service provider ?

Or am I limited to a single phone adapter ? In this case, I suppose there are some wireless options that might help. I have seen some VOIP wireless phones & answering machines. But how do I deal with the fax in both office rooms ??? It seems these would need to be both connected to a different VOIP phone adapter.

I haven't chosen a provider yet, and obviously not the hardware either, since that will depend on the answers I get.

Thanks.

[DracoFelis]

Originally Posted by madbrain

My question is, if I have ethernet connections everywhere needed, can I purchase multiple VOIP / analog phone adapters for each room, and use them all with the same service provider ?

That depends upon your VoIP provider. Most VoIP providers will only let you connect to them with a single device. In which case the answer is no, you can't do that.

But if your VoIP provider allows you to connect multiple devices to it "at the same time", then the answer is yes, its possible.

Originally Posted by madbrain

In this case, I suppose there are some wireless options that might help. I have seen some VOIP wireless phones & answering machines. But how do I deal with the fax in both office rooms ??? It seems these would need to be both connected to a different VOIP phone adapter.

Have you considered the option to rewire the phone jacks in your house, so that they are all feeding off the output of a single VoIP adapter?

If you know what you are doing, this is actually pretty easy to do. Just make CERTAIN you are not cross-connecting your house wiring with the VoIP adapter, as doing so can damage both your equipment and the telcos, this is actually pretty easy to do.

Check out the details below:

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,13749363

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

[mberlant]

Another note of caution - VoIP does not play well with fax and data modems. In order to get any success passing fax or data traffic you will need to have quite a few constraints fall perfectly into place. Please have a look at some of the discussions mentioning "fax" to get the details.

[madbrain]

Hi,

Originally Posted by DracoFelis

Most VoIP providers will only let you connect to them with a single device. In which case the answer is no, you can't do that.

But if your VoIP provider allows you to connect multiple devices to it "at the same time", then the answer is yes, its possible.

How do I find which providers allow this ?
Google searches brought up only vonage, which is on the higher price end. Are there any others?

Originally Posted by DracoFelis

Have you considered the option to rewire the phone jacks in your house, so that they are all feeding off the output of a single VoIP adapter?

If you know what you are doing, this is actually pretty easy to do. Just make CERTAIN you are not cross-connecting your house wiring with the VoIP adapter, as doing so can damage both your equipment and the telcos, this is actually pretty easy to do.

Check out the details below:

http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,13749363

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

I have read about it, but this isn't possible for me because I only have one analog line running throughout the house, and I use DSL.

[DracoFelis]

Originally Posted by DracoFelis

But if your VoIP provider allows you to connect multiple devices to it "at the same time", then the answer is yes, its possible.

Originally Posted by madbrain

How do I find which providers allow this ?

Ask the provider, perhaps?

NOTE:
I'm sure there are several providers that allow "multiple registrations". However, the only two that I have personal experience with are:

1) Free World Dialup. However, FWD doesn't let you do outbound normal telco calls (but you can receive inbound telco calls, if you get a free http://ipkall.com number)

2) Teliax.com, on their "Pay as you go" accounts (but not on their "unlimited" accounts). However, the Teliax.com PAYGO accounts also charge by the minute, so it's actually in their best interest to make it easy to use their service "as much as possible".

Originally Posted by DracoFelis

Have you considered the option to rewire the phone jacks in your house, so that they are all feeding off the output of a single VoIP adapter?

Originally Posted by madbrain

I have read about it, but this isn't possible for me because I only have one analog line running throughout the house, and I use DSL.

If you have 2-line phone jacks (or you can rewire your house for 2-line jacks), it's still possible to do, just a little more tricky to setup initially.

For example, here's the phone wiring setup in my house:

1) My DSL line is wired up to only the single phone jack, were I actually keep my DSL modem. None of the other jacks in the house get the DSL signals. i.e. I ran custom phone wiring to the DSL modem, from the place where the DSL service enters the house.

2) After filtering the DSL signals out of the telco/DSL line, I hooked up the "filtered" (DSL signals removed) side up to the "Line 1" wires of my house phone jacks.

3) I hooked up the "Line 2" wires of the jacks in my house to each other (i.e. all jack's "line 2" wires are connected to each other), but those "line 2" wires were NOT in any way hooked up to the telco (just to each other).

4) I plugged the output of my Sipura SPA3000 into the "line 2" side of one of my phone jacks. That "backfeeds" the output of the SPA-3000 onto the "Line 2" phone wiring in my house!

The effect of this setup is:

A) My DSL modem is happy (and my internet service works fine), as I have a specific wire/jack just for the DSL modem.

B) The "Line 1" side of my home telco jacks see my telco line. And furthermore, none of the phones using "Line 1" need DSL filters, as I've already "filtered out" the DSL signals before feeding them into the house jacks.

C) The "Line 2" side of my home telco jacks see my VoIP line. This works because I'm "backfeeding" the output of my SPA3000 into the "Line 2" wiring in the house.

D) All the 2-line phones in the housel see "Line 1" as my telco line, and "Line 2" as my VoIP line. So I can make/answer a telco call by using a phone's "Line 1", and I can make/answer a VoIP call by using "Line 2". This is really just a simple byproduct of B and C (above).