My Phones are not working.
The telephone company, bless their souls, provides you with service through four wires or more wires leading to the outside of your house (there is actually more to it than that, but you don't need to know more to work on your own stuff). These wires connect to a box called a network interface, usually located outside your home for ease of access by the telephone company.
It's also referred to as a protector (just the sound of it makes you tingle, eh?) The name "protector" is apt... it protects your house telephone wiring from unusual electrical surges from lightning strikes, power lines that may touch outside telephone cables, etc. Not a foolproof system, but very effective 99.9% of the time. The protector can often be found near your electrical service (meter), because the phone company and the electric company use the same criteria for choosing an access point to your home.
The network interface acts as your main junction box- the place where all telephone cables leading into your house originate. Usually, part of it is off limits to you. It may be sealed with a lock, or screwed shut. This is where the phone company makes its connections. The wiring colors will not correspond with the color coding of your interior telephone wires.
The customer-accessible side uses the standard color coding that you will run into again and again in all telephone work. Most common telephone cables have four wires inside... red, green, black and yellow. In the trade they are referred to as "pairs". The red-green pair is used for basic one line service, and the black-yellow pair is used to provide a second line.
If you look at the blowup of the network interface to the left, you will see that there is a "block" with six colored screws. There are three pairs together... yellow-black, red-green and a second yellow-black. You will also notice that there are wires connected to the red and green terminals. In this connector, there is only one live telephone line... line 1. Though the connector can carry up to three lines, for ease of customer use they usually only install one line per connector. If you had three lines, you would have one connector serving one line, and the second connector serving two lines. This network interface box has two such connectors, so this home could conceivably have up to six telephone lines installed.
The actual connection to your wiring is made through the telephone jack in the connector by means of the removable plug attached to the black wire. Disconnecting this plug disables the telephone lines attached to the connector. This plug makes troubleshooting a little easier, since you can plug a tester into the jack to see if the telephone company's lines are okay (more later on troubleshooting).
For AVAYA, NORSTAR, NEC, SAMSUNG, MITEL, PANASONIC, TOSHIBA telephone systems and voicemail call (866)206-2316 or email
MasterTelephone@gmail.com
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