So you want to cut the cord between you and the Phone company/Telco.No problem, there are several solutions out there that provide Voice Over Internet Protocol (also known as VOIP, a fancy way of saying phone conversations using the data lines over the Internet). There are good reasons to do this, one of the main ones is that it is a less expensive solution - at least for now. So you try Magicjack, or Vonage, or Skype, and everything seems to work with one phone, and now you want to wire your house, and cut off your landline service. It is a pretty simple process. If you are interested, take a look at Modem Booster. You just disconnect the incoming phone line from your house, and plug the phone line from your computer into a telephone wall-jack and all the phones in your house should now have a dial tone. You make a call, it works, and you are happy.Then the phone rings. Well, some of them do, but they sound really sick, half-dead even. The reason they sound this way is because there is not enough power being sent over the line to ring all the phones. Your traditional landline service provided enough power to ring 5 of the old style, double ring phones and thus was said to have a Ringer Equivalence Number (REN) of 5. VOIP solutions usually use the power output from the USB port of the computer, and have a REN of about 3.5. Fortunately newer phones use less than 1 REN per phone, but many people have enough phones, with a few older phones in the mix, to experience problems with the ring.One way to overcome this is to disconnect the ringer in any older phones that are near enough to be able to hear another phone that rings. another solution is to use those cordless phones that have a single base unit. Only the base unit will be powered by the phone line, and should use less than one ren.Using a powered USB HUB between the VOIP device and the computer may boost the power enough to ring a few phones, one can find them for about twenty dollars.Or, one could resolve low REN problems with a ring booster, a device that costs about a hundred dollars, but will take 1 REN input and output about 7 REN, or use a ring amplifier - a fifteen dollar device that senses power over the ring circuit of your phoneline and uses batteries or house power to ring.Finally a free solution that I found most effective was to connect my line from the VOIP device (in my case the MagicJack) to my modem "line in" jack. My modem "line out" went to the wall jack and provided enough REN for the house. Since my computer came with the Modem, this solution was free. I did have to set my modem not to answer the phone, in order not to interfere with incoming calls and my voice mail. A bonus of using this solution was that I can fax from my computer, and with a little tweaking I bet I could have my modem sniff for incoming faxes or set up a virtual PBX, but for the moment I am content to have my phones ring as they are supposed to. For more info, visit this site.
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