from the way it sounds, you have an old surge protector, and your internal wiring is all home runs to it. they are disconnected and therefore must all be reconntected for the jacks to work.

verify which wire(s) come from the telco and leave them alone. hook up the other wires, so that all jacks are now wired in. be sure to match the pairs correctly. then plug in your VOIP phone as instructed.

you may need to use a toner to find out which wires are what. you could also check your local phone book/classified ads to see if there are any telco installers in the area. for a nominal fee anyone who knows what he is doing can get the jacks going in less than an hour, short of internal wiring problems that requrie replacement.

i meant to ask, hav eyou tried plugging in the VOIP to one of your jacks? if the telco is disconnected at the surge protector, then that step is already accomplished. if the internal wiring is all connected together properly, you may not have to do anything else.

I will tell you how I have my vonage wired up. I too have no NID on the outside of my house.

Here is what I did. In my basement I have a terminal block with all the phone jacks that home run to it. You should have something similar. all i did was pull the two wires that went to the outside connection and pluged the VOIP straight into the jack with a 2 outlets to one plug device i picked up at the big box store. then I plugged the phone at the computer into the other side. Works fine. What you end up doing is backfeed all the jacks from one outlet.

Here is a link that might be useful: dual jack

Call the TELCO and tell them you have a service problem.
Without a NID they cannot determine on what side of the demarche (the NID) the problem is.
They must provide service to the NID.
If no NID is in place they have to come out and install one at no cost.
You then have to make all the wiring after the NID behave.

brickeye, it does not work that way when you do not have landline service. they only HAVE fix it if you are paying for dial tone.

If you do not have landline service you would not have a NID.
Network Interface Device.
It is the legal boundary (demarch) between the TELCO wiring and yours. If you donot have any TELCO copper to your house no NID and allthe problems are yours.

If you are using an ISP everything is your problem since this wiring is entirely within your house anyway.

If the OP has a landline phone and is paying a phone bill he can demand a NID be installed.
The mess of wiring is not the phone companies problem, since it is part of you house wiring no matter what.
If you are trying to use old residential wiring without a NID you may be seeing the load of whatever stub the TELCO used to feed the house, all the way back to the CO.
This could easily present problems for ISP phone service to try and drive.

from the way he describes it, he is using a VOIP phone to get dialtone over the internet, NOT traditional POTS service. a NID only applies to POTS service and certain other telco supplied special circuits. since he is using his internet jack, i assume he has FTTC or FTTP or at the very least a dry pair DSL service. none of these require a dedicated NID.

the old surge suppressors are a legal demarc point. they are not used anymore now that it is legal for the customer to test his own wiring, but still not "quite" legal for the customer to mess with the telco wiring. on the old suppressors, you almost have to remove the telco wiring with a wrench in order to test your wiring, on a NID you simply unplug a phone cord, or in some cases open the cover and it auto disconnects.

in either case, the OP needs to disconnect the wires that come from the pole or ped to his house. but make sure you do not disconnect the ones that supply your internet connection. with no telco provided dial tone, sometimes the normal phone pairs are used to provide service for the dry pair DSL if that is what you have.

So similar problem and I liked brickeyee’s suggestion of calling the TELCO with a service prob: our sitch is we just had internet installed at my parent’s cabin. It os very remote. No cell service, no cable service. Just landline. Frontier came out and was able to get 1 port of the router working but needed to find the NIB to hook up the remaining 2 wires for that 2nd port. No NIB to be found. We searched the entire structure, the garage up at the road, and even searched the woods for a random post with a NID. Does anyone know if 20-30 years ago if TELCOs would share a NID between 2-3 properties? The only thing that made me think of this is when I took over the TELCO acct from my parents’ name, I was amused that the address wasn’t right. The address on the acct was for the cabin 2 doors down. Now I’m wondering if that is because that is where the NID is located? (We live 2 hours away so I came to this theory after the drive home and noodling where the heck else the NID could be that I hadn’t checked)