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Wiring help??

Started by bowhuntr09, February 14, 2018, 06:29:09 PM

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bowhuntr09

Long story, but I'm coming off of Comcast Xfinity. When they installed a couple of years ago I didn't have a phone jack in the room that their modem was going in. They said no problem and ran a phone line from my telco box, up the house and into the room. That RJ-11 was until recently plugged into the cable modem.

My hope was that I could plug that into my Obi and backfeed my phone jacks through the house. That doesn't seem to work. If I plug that into the Obi I get "line in use" displayed on my cordless phones and no dial tone.

I have the Obi currently working by moving my cordless base from the kitchen downstairs and plugging it directly into the Obi. Can anyone tell me how to make the old comcast cord work for backfeed? I opened the telco box and that cord has 2 wires (blue and white w/blue stripe) screwed down on two posts on the telco side of the box.

SteveInWA

Just by looking at that photo alone, no, we can't tell you what to do.  It's the typical rat's nest of historical wiring changes.

But, if you understand basic electrical wiring, I can tell you what you can do to figure it out yourself.

The dirty block with the four big bolts is the original connection point for one or two pairs of wires coming in from the POTS telephone company (via a telephone pole or underground cable).  From there, it goes to the modular jacks inside the box.  the jacks are intended as a customer-accessible disconnect and wiring test point.  For example, if there was a problem with the house wiring, the customer could unplug the modular jacks for line 1 and line 2, and plug a modular phone cord and phone directly in there, to see if it works.

Telephones are wired according to the diagram attached.  Note the house wiring in most houses built in the 1970s or newer use 8-conductor, Cat-5 twisted pair cable, with each pair having a primary color, and a white wire with stripes of that primary color.  So, line 1 is always blue and blue/white, and line 2 is always orange with white/orange stripe, etc.

Your challenge is to find and disconnect all the wires from both the old POTS telephone company, AND from the Comcast Xfinity service.  If you don't do that, you might fry the OBi.  So, the first thing that should be disconnected are the blue/blue+white and orange/orange+white wires off of the 4-bolt connector block.  The next thing to do is to  determine if you have an security alarm panel wired to the phone line.  IF you do, it makes things much more confusing to trace.

There will likely be (based on the jumble of phone cable on the left side of the photo) several different runs of cable, to different parts of your house, including the one that Comcast ran to backfeed from their MTU (cable modem/router/VoIP device).   The goal is to connect all of the cables together (all blue wires together all blue+white wires together, etc.).  However, if you have an alarm, then the very confusing thing will be that the phone line was originally looped from that box, to the alarm panel, and then back to the box, and from there, to the phones in the house.  This may involve a color change.  But, from the photo, all I can see are the L1 and L2 pairs.

The end result should be:

Old POTS Telco  /cut/        cable from OBi--->house wiring--->jacks
Old Comcast Telco  /cut/

If you aren't comfortable tracing this out, then the best alternative is to just plug the cordless phone base into the OBi, and use cordless phones, or hire an electrician with low-voltage wiring expertise.

bowhuntr09

That is helpful! Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Lavarock7

I assume that they also took their equipment?

My neighbor had cable internet and the cable company installed a router with a voice connection whih then fed the house wiring. When they dropped telephone service, the cable company remotely reconfigured the router/modem to not supply telephone dialtone. The wiring continues to be connected to their box.

Was the old equipment removed from the phone lines?
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