Home Phone Line Wiring Problems

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Guess what! I disconnected the orange pair and now Line 1 is working fine. It looks like fault is somewhere on the orange pair (house wiring?) but why did that cause fault on the rest of the 3 pairs?

Oh well; I am no longer going to play with it any more. It was an interesting experience and good exercise in sharpening my diagnostics skills :) Let us leave it at that.
 
Originally Posted By: Vikas
Guess what! I disconnected the orange pair and now Line 1 is working fine. It looks like fault is somewhere on the orange pair (house wiring?) but why did that cause fault on the rest of the 3 pairs?


Because there is a short somewhere between the blue and the orange wires, probably inside a box where the wire was stripped too long or someone was careless when making a termination.

Where exactly did you disconnect the orange pair? At the ONT? The provider hooked up all four pairs (or two, depending on your wiring) at the ONT?
 
Provider had only connected blue and orange pairs. I disconnected orange pair at the ONT Line 1 block. Before moving to Line2 I thought I should try and I plugged in the RJ11 jack to make that block active. I saw that Off-hook green led did NOT turn ON. I went upstairs and plugged in a "real" phone and had the dial tone.

I can not envision how all conductors in the house wiring be shorted to each other but I can't ignore the evidence. May be there is a fault in the jumper block in such a way that when it gets closed, it causes short across the entire block. It is an interesting theory and I might be able to prove it but I have no intention of recreating the fault. The most I am willing to do is to check the disconnected pair via multi-meter but that too I am resisting the urge.

Let the sleeping dogs lie. I thought dogs always tell the truth and they never lie. Besides have you come across a talking dog or worse a dog who talks in his sleep and lies through his teeth?
 
There really should only be one pair of your cat5 per active line connected at the phone company interface. Don't know why they hooked up two pairs in parallel in the first place.
 
You mentioned a punch block. Not sure what style you have, but the short could be there if it was an old manual style and all ends were not carefully trimmed or trimmed ends removed from the 'forest' of bare posts.

Odd they connected two pairs when only one is needed. Then again, I've seen lots of weird wiring in my time. Glad you got it fixed.
 
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There are 2 punch blocks right next to each other each supporting 4 pairs. Bottom RJ11 wire is Line1 and the top one is Line2. Line1 has all (on the right half) red/green colors and Line2 have yellow/black (on the left half) colors. House CAT5 blue pair was plugged in to topmost red/green of Line1 and orange pair was plugged in to next red/black of Line1. Brown and Green pairs were not plugged in. The ONT only has valid dial tone on the Line 1 top red/green.

Decades ago, I had two phone lines, one was used for dial up modem. Some of you probably never heard of it. That is why two pairs were used from the CAT5. Each pair is independent of each other. A short on one will not affect the other. My entire home wiring is a single run aka bus topology.
 
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Actually it looks like 4 analog lines come out of the ONT electronics, two on each of the plugs. These then split out to 4 terminal blocks.

The outdoor mounted ONT shown on Verizon's site has a row of 4 jacks on the electronics unit to make the situation more clear and permit fully independent testing of the 4 lines.
 
I have another question about this style of ONT. I see an Ethernet jack right next to the two phone jacks. My internet is NOT coming from there but from a cable modem which is upstairs and hooked up to RG6 cable modem. This seems to be rather unnecessary extra signal conversion i.e. data stream portion gets extracted out from the fiber and then demuxed back in to RG6 which the upstairs modem then extracts out back in to data stream.

Is the Ethernet jack on the ONT only for debugging? I already have an Ethernet switch next to the ONT. Can I get more bandwidth if I bypass the cable modem or am I already limited by the incoming pipe?
 
Given that there are ability to hook up 8 pairs, ONT in theory can support 8 analog lines, correct?
 
I don't actually have FIOS but here is what I have heard about using the Ethernet port.

1. You have to call Verizon and have them (remotely) reconfigure your ONT to enable the Ethernet port.
1a. Using the Ethernet port disables the coaxial port. It is an either/or choice.
2. Thus you will need to also convert the wiring to your TV converter box(es) from coax to Ethernet.
3. Your router needs to support VLANs on the Ethernet, as the ONT outputs TV and internet traffic on the same cable but tagged with separate VLANs. This is more the domain of professional equipment, as consumer grade routers don't have VLAN capability out of the box. But many models will work when flashed with third-party firmware like OpenWrt.

In short, an Ethernet setup not for beginners. People are doing it mostly to get away from using the Verizon provided router and have more routing options with third party firmware.
 
I appreciate your research on this. I will forget that ethernet port. Come to think of it, I am not even going to open that ONT cover any more :)
 
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