So you want to hook up your whole house to your VOIPo adapter…

\\ Do NOT plug a VoIP device into a phone line (jack in wall) while that phone line is still connected to the local phone company. Doing so may fry your VoIP device.\\

Here are some helpful tips to follow.

First step is to find the Telephone Network Interface box. This is the gray box located outside and it may be imprinted with "Telephone Network Interface."
The box contains a 'customer' side and a 'phone company' side. Don't worry, you cannot access the 'phone company' side of this box, the part that you can open is meant to be opened by you, and is clearly labeled "Customer Access."

When you open the customer side of the box, you will likely see a bunch of wires and one or more line modules. Each 'line module' provides a phone line to your house.

The short phone cord connects to the red/green posts. The red/green screw posts are where you add wires to connect your entire house to the phone company or in this case the VoIP adapter.

Now unplug the phone cord (modular plug) from the phone jack in the box. Just make sure you unplug the correct line (your house may have multiple phone lines, some unused.) Also, you will need to ensure that the plug doesn’t get plugged back in the future. I recommend putting tape over the jack or tape around the plug end.

Congratulations, all the jacks in the house are now still connected to each other, but not to the phone company.

You can now go back inside and connect your ATA via a phone cord to a wall jack in your house. Use a standard phone cord to connect the line out of your ATA to the wall jack. Once you have connected your VoIP adapter to the wall jack every jack in the house will have a dial tone.

Important notes to consider:

REN, or Ringer Equivalence Number is a measurement of 'load' the phone device (telephone, fax, etc) places on the phone line. The phone company usually supplies enough current on a phone line to support a total REN load of 5.0.

So, just go to each and every device plugged into phone jacks around the house and look under each device -- you should see a REN number. Add up the REN number for all devices and the total should be less than 5.0. If under 5.0, you are fine. If over 5.0, you have overloaded the phone line.

If you are over a REN total of 5.0 you have a couple of choices. Simply remove some rarely used phone extensions, or buy some newer lower-REN phones. If you overload the REN, some phone may not ring properly, caller id may not always function, or the phones might not work at all.

Home Run vs. Daisy Chain the ideal wiring situation is where all cables to phone jacks are 'home runs' -- where each jack location has a separate cable running from the jack back to a central location. The phone network then implements a 'star topology'. In some older homes, you may have something called a 'daisy chain' -- where a cable runs to one jack, is tapped into, then runs to another jack, etc. Daisy Chaining is the least preferred method because a fault in the cable or jack affects all jacks 'downstream' from the fault.

Notes: I would have posted pictures but it seems the forum will not allow me to upload. Said this is not a valid image file, but clearly it was a jpg.