Can I use all phones in my house with Magic Jack

[holmzee]

I currently have a vonage account. My question about MJ is this, I have a phone in every room of my house, will I be able to use them or will I only be able to use the phone that is plugged into MJ? Vonage allows all my phones to be used that are plugged into a phone jack. Does MJ work like Vonage where all my phones will work? Also I have a fax machine, will that work as it does now or will it have to be plugged into the MJ directly. Thanks, Shawn

[snowigloo]

sorry no

[ellenh64]

Ok, this is what I have done. I ran a phone line from the magicjack to a phone jack near the computer. Now all the other phone jacks in the house work. I have my cordless phone plugged into the jack in the kitchen and another phone plugged into the bedroom jack.

I haven't tried a fax machine, but I have read fax isn't supported.

[gary]

I would think that you can either use Vonage or the magicJack this way not both at the same time.

[lenagainster]

I have a phone in every room of my house, will I be able to use them or will I only be able to use the phone that is plugged into MJ?

There doesn't seem to be a direct answer to that question on the MJ site, but they do say that any regular phone can be plugged into the MJ device to be used. That implies that a old fashioned corded phone can be used, one that gets its power from the phone line. These phones have a Ringer Equivalence Number (REN) of one (1). So the MJ device should be able to drive the REN of at least one (1). Cordless phones have their own power source and typically have an REN of about .1 or .2 (point 1, point 2). The number should be noted somewhere on the bottom of the base of the phones. Add up the total of all the RENs for all the phones, and if it is less than 1, the MJ device should be able to handle it. So by plugging the cord that went to your Vonage TA into the MJ, it should work if the REN is equal to or less than 1. Note that on some very old phones, polarity makes a difference. If you don't have a way of testing polarity, don't use an old phone. Plugging one in at a time and testing as you go may be your best bet.

[oldguyinlargo]

[font=Arial] [/font]MJ spport told me that my extention phones will work.

[groagan]

Usually, residential phone jacks are 'daisy chained' when the phone wire is installed. Just make sure that all the jacks have the green and red wire tied down to the green and red wire of the jacks. (green to green, red to red) If they are daisy chained, you should have 2 reds and 2 greens on all jacks. One is comming into the jack and the other is leaving to go to the next jack. The last jack in the string will only have one set (pair), as it doesn't have any more jacks to go to. You can use a TEE adapter to plug magic jack and a phone in.

If someone wired the house for CAT5, then the white and blue wires (pair) are used. You would then have to 'daisy chain' the white and blue on the termination block. I have wired my house for CAT5. I used a 2 line splitter. I plan to plug the magic jack into line 2 of the splitter. (as soon as my area code comes available) This will sent the dial tone back to the block on either the orange or green pair, depending on who wired the house. In my case, it is the green pair. I then go to the 110 termination block, connect the green pair of the cable with the splitter, to all of the blue pairs, including the jack with the splitter. Bingo, all phone jacks now will have dial tone. Remenber, too many phones may draw ring current down and phones will not ring. Also as the prior post mentioned, polarity might be an issue with some phones.

[stroths]

If you connect your MJ to your house's wiring, make sure your phone wiring isn't hooked up to the telephone company any longer. If it is, there is a voltage carried on the line that can cause issues. My outside telephone line is completely disconnected from the telco.

[HendersonMike]

The answer to holmzee's question is absolutely. I just did it.
Had it not been for stroths's post, it would not have been possible. I had tried my configuration prior to unplugging the phone companies lines and could not get the phone ringers or the answering machine to work. But, after I unplugged the phone company's lines to the house... Good to go.. That trickle of electricity was the culprit. I kicked my phone company to the curb yesterday so un-plugging them completely from the house was no problem.
So, it does work for at least 2 phones.
I still have yet to test the fax machine. It had worked prior using just the fax and phone. I'll have to wait till tomorrow to test that. ((UPDATE)) Fax works perfectly!!!!

[LikeMagic]

Nice drawing!

Good luck with faxing though. It may work if you lower the fax baud rate down to 9600 baud or perhaps even down to 4800 baud for fax to work reliably. If you have good experience, please share!

[HendersonMike]

Nice drawing!

Good luck with faxing though. It may work if you lower the fax baud rate down to 9600 baud or perhaps even down to 4800 baud for fax to work reliably. If you have good experience, please share!

The fax worked like a charm. I actually tested it last night but forgot to come back and edit my post.
I used the HP Test Fax Line --- 1-888-473-2963. Send a B&W fax and they will send back a confirmation.

[LikeMagic]

That's good to hear. Do you know what baud rate your fax machine is set at & connected at? Auto or 14.4k? If it's set at "auto" then the fax machine would auto-negotiate a speed that both sides of faxing could "understand" each other. Some reported that they had issue when setting the fax baud rate at 14.4k. They had to lower to 9.6k baud to have fax work reliably (or set to auto baud rate but this could increase the "negotiating" time to connect & fax).

Anyway, it's good to know that your MJ setup works fine for faxing. I will hook up my fax machine after I remodel my home office

[HendersonMike]

That's good to hear. Do you know what baud rate your fax machine is set at & connected at?

Don't have the slightest idea.

[LikeMagic]

I was just curious. It doesn't really matter much since most of us (my guess here) only send/receive fax occasionally. So, slow (or fast) fax speed does not really matter. And besides, there's no LD charges on MJ line so it's NOT important

[zhotster]

I received my MJ just this week and wanted to have all of my phones and fax working. I have a newer Canon fax, I had to set the baud rate down to 9600 baud and also TURN OFF error correction. I did a number of tests and as soon as I bumped the baud rate to 14400 I had problems. It seems to work very well. I am a rare fax user, but when I have needed it in the past I had to drive to work or a friend's house that had one.

I had unhooked my phone company's outside lines about 4 years ago. I had to use a powered USB hub to get everything working with my whole house setup. I have 4 phones plus a fax machine and all now work. The Dell PC I had (4 year-old machine) wouldn't power things up well enough, the USB hub did the trick.

[LikeMagic]

Awesome! Good to hear that your fax is working with MJ, 9600 baud is still very good fax speed. Now only if I have time to finish my home office remodeling so I could move my fax machine in there