Home Wiring Not Supported? Please help

[chriswx]

Hi There,

Over the weekend one of the phone line ports on my GrandStream Adapter burned out and after going back and forth with support I was finally told that Voipo does not support home wiring and that is the reason why the port burned out. However, prior to subscribing to Voipo, I had Comcast Digital Voice Service. A technician came to my house from Comcast to install that service and hooked their cable modem/phone adapter directly to my home wiring to the wall so all the phones in the house would work. The technican also disconnected the outside phone line, so there would be no voltage going to the modem. This service worked fine for a full year until I decided to switch to Voipo because of the large price difference. So, please help me understand, if Comcast Digitial Voice (VOIP Service) obviously supports using the home wiring, why doesn't Voipo? Do I need to shop around for a new service that does support home wiring? Just hooking up one phone to the Grandstream adapter will not meet my needs and I will not just have cordless phones all over the house.

Thanks to anyone, including someone in management at Voipo who can shed some more light on this for me.

Thanks,

Chris

[tritch]

Voipo seems to have taken a hard line stance lately that they don't support home wiring hookups. Apparently, too many of their customers ATA's have been damaged due to nearby lightning strikes. I suppose they have to protect themselves from equipment damage, but IMHO they need to update their Terms of Service which forbids this type of hookup. Otherwise, customers will keep on hooking up their ATA to their home wiring without knowing the full consequences of a damaged ATA.

Read these threads....

http://forums.voipo.com/showthread.p...eplacement-fee
http://forums.voipo.com/showthread.p...T-502-Settings

Personally, I don't have an issue with hooking up the ATA to the home wiring. I've had my own Linksys ATA hooked up this way for 4 years now with no problems at all. I live near Houston, so I've had a lot of storms come through my area. It's always risky with nearby lightning strikes, but so far so good. It's possible that Linksys ATA's tolerate a slightly higher induced voltage on the line ports than the Grandstream ATA's before it's damaged. I simply don't know. It's possible that Comcast's devices are the same way, but maybe they are willing to absorb the cost of lightning damage where as Voipo does not.

If you must have it hooked up this way and willing to take the risk again, my advice would be to go BYOD. The bad part about this is that you are on your own with no technical support from Voipo.....

[voipinit]

The problem is connecting to house wiring has to be done properly. I have had VOIP devices connected to my house wiring since 2002 with not one failure from electrical surge. I have had the HT-502 for 5 years with no problem. My property has been hit twice by lightning and travel down the underground power lines into my house which destroyed 3 electronic devices once. None of my Internet devices were damaged that were protected by surge protectors and further by UPS. Of course a lot of the energy went to the house ground before finding its way inside the house, as no surge protection can overcome a direct lightning strike. However, if my outside phone line was connected the energy would have found it's way to the phone system as the phone system is grounded thru the house ground. Since most surge protectors shunt the surge to ground, it can find it's way to anything that is sharing the same ground. Just sharing my experience.

[chriswx]

Hello Tritch,

Thanks so much for your reply. Yes, I agree with you that the TOS should be updated to address the home phone issue. You know, it's funny, when I was first researching VOIP providers, I did like the Linksys PapT and the SPA-2102 adapters the best. However, those few providers charged around $15.00 a month for their minimum plans and did not offer the pre-paid option. That is substantially more than Voipo. So, Voipo was the winner. With that being said, it appears that the BYOD option that you mentioned is probably the best bet for me. My only concern is encountering problems finding the proper settings for the adapter. Which Linksys adapter are you using and how did you go about finding the settings for it?

To the other poster, thanks for your reply as well. However, I would hope that a Comcast Tech would know what they were doing before hooking up their modem to my home wiring. Also, I live in Connecticut and we have not had a thunderstorm since about late September. So, I'm not convinced it was a lightning strike that caused the port to burn out. I do not have the phone line hooked to a surge suppressor, but that is something I'll look into to hopefully prevent another burn out of the port.

Thanks,

Chris

[tritch]

With that being said, it appears that the BYOD option that you mentioned is probably the best bet for me. My only concern is encountering problems finding the proper settings for the adapter. Which Linksys adapter are you using and how did you go about finding the settings for it?

I'm using the SPA2102. About 95% of the settings were left at the factory default. I probably changed about dozen or more settings. Most of those settings were strictly tailored for my personal preferences, but only a few settings were actually made based on my research and recommendations by other experienced VOIP users. Basically, you enter your BYOD user ID, password and SIP server host name in the proper fields in the ATA and your good to go for the most part. You can always tweak things later (dial plans, etc) to your liking. If you wish, I could post my settings in a pdf file.

Personally, if you feel uncomfortable about setting up your own ATA and want to make it easier for yourself, then getting one of the newer Obihai ATA's is the way to go . It's my understanding that some of the same engineers that designed the Linkysys PAP2/SPA2102 are the ones who designed these products. They are getting good reviews for their design quality and features. Voipo's CEO (Tim) recently mentioned in the thread below that Voipo is now a preconfigured provider for their Obihai ATA's. It sounds as simple as entering your BYOD user ID and password and everything is automatically configured for you. Here's his thread:

http://forums.voipo.com/showthread.p...i-VOIPo-Option

Here's the link to Obihai products...just pick the ATA that suits your need.
http://www.obihai.com/product-primer.html

Hope this helps......

[voipinit]

... However, I would hope that a Comcast Tech would know what they were doing before hooking up their modem to my home wiring. ...

In my area a cable technician will not touch a customers phone line unless they subscribe to phone service from the cable company. You may want to check.

[chriswx]

Hi Voipinit,

I actually did subscribe to Comcast Digital Voice service for one year before switching to Voipo. I had no problems, but I just switched in July to Voipo from Comcast because after the 12 month promos expire on Comcast the pricing is ridiculous. Just as much as AT&T for the most part.

[christcorp]

There's a lot more to it than just voltage from the Ma'Bell circuit or lightning. There is something called "REN" that 90+% of all people using a phone have no idea about. REN stands for Ringer Equivalence Number. What that means is; how many "Traditional" ringers the network, (In this case the Voip adapter), can handle. Remember, it takes current to make your phone RING. The more ringers, the more current is required to make the phones ring. While more modern day phones have bird chirp type ringers compared to the older phone with actual bells; and draw LESS amperage than they did years ago; there is still a limit. If you cross this limit, you can draw too much current from the voip adapter and possibly burn it out. In my house for instance, I have 11 phones; YES ELEVEN; phones connected to my voip adapter. However; I only have 4 of the phones with the ringers turned on. I have these 4 strategically places throughout the house so that when the phone rings, I can hear at least 1 of the 4.

Mind you, this is just one of the possible issues with connecting your whole house up to a voip adapter. Most people probably don't have too high of current to handle the max REN of the adapter. But it is definitely possible. Add this to those people who have poor lines; lightning; back feed from the phone company; using phone lines as IT Network extenders; fire/burgler alarms in tandom; and many other possibilities, and you can see that it's almost impossible for VoipO to support the many different scenarios. I can't blame them.

[ymhee_bcex]

I would suggest that VOIPo makes this restriction on home wiring much more prominent during sign-up process. You may have mentioned somewhere in small print but certainly not with the prominence it deserves. You seem to be the only company that has this restrictions (I am sure you will find another one; but I asked VoicePulse and PhonePower - and they said they don't prohibit). And Time Warner advertises that they will come and make sure that phone jacks work the same way they work with your [PSTN provider].

Anyway, this doesn't apply to me personally - I haven't used home wiring for almost a decade (it probably doesn't work, anyway); and I use BYOD adapter. But I've seen several threads here and on DSLR where people complain about this issue. Got to be more transparent - it's good for business!

[christcorp]

VoipO doesn't "RESTRICT" an individual from using their home wiring. There's no way they could restrict it. It's not possible. They simply don't support it. And; if somehow, your ATA (Analog Telephone Adapter - voip adapter) becomes inoperative because of your home wiring; because the customer didn't know what they were doing, then VoipO simply isn't going to warrant the adapter. VoipO doesn't need to do anything to make it clearer. The back of the adapter has a jack. It's intended for you to put a PHONE in it. What you plug into it is totally up to you. But it's your responsibility.