no it is not a safety hazzard. it can make you hurt yourself if you have ahold of the bare wire when the phone rings though!

if some jacks are labeled for line 2, then the red/green pair on them is connected to the telco yellow/black pair at the demarc. move all reds to red and all greens to green if you want them all to work on the same line.

The open voltage on a phone line is 48 V DC, but the ring voltage is 90 V at 20 Hz, on top of the DC voltage.

You need to be touching BOTH wires to get a jolt though.

The impedance to ground (earth) is usually pretty high (unless the CO is right next door).

When I moved out of my old house, I felt sorry for the new owners as I had 4 phone lines into the house. I had my office there and had dedicated lines to the office and around the house. It was perfect for me, but a mess to figure out for the new owner. It would be too hard to explain how I had the house wired, but essentially what I did was go out to the box on the side of the house where the lines split and remove all but the one main line, then use jumpers to connect all the lines going in the house to the line from the phone company. Called a guy I know who works for the phone company and told him what I was doing. He said I'm not supposed to be in that side of the box, but what I did would work fine. So every phone outlet in the house was now live.

According to AT&T, the ringing signal is an 88v 20Hz A.C. signal superimposed on 48v nominal D.C. supervisory voltage. However, the actual ringing signal used can and does vary greatly from one location to another.

To touch on the last posting, the box on the side of the house is ok to get into, you just need to understand the concept of a Demarcation (or a demarc). You have every right to work on your premise cabling on your property. The only thing you need to stay away from is the incomming cable that is terminated on the left side of the box. Anything after the box or the protection fuses, is your's to work on and test.

Actually, the LEC will provide a test port so you can test the line respectively. If you plug your phone jack in the port and there is no dial-tone, you can tell them you have no service or there is a problem with the line without you touching their cable.

Good luck!

sorry but in this day and age, why bother with all the jacks. Buy a cordless setup with multiple handsets and have phones whereever you want, whenever you want. I can see one traditional phone in case of power failures but 90+% of people have a cellphone that will cover that situation.

"Buy a cordless setup with multiple handsets and have phones whereever you want, whenever you want."

Cordless phones are not really very secure.
It is not hard at all to listen in on them, even the newer 'scrambled' ones only have a small number of codes.

This thread is almost 2 years old.

S'what... I have cottage cheese in my fridge older than that! ;-b

Does it match the phone line, red and green?

> Cordless phones are not really very secure.
> It is not hard at all to listen in on them, even the newer 'scrambled' ones only have a small number of codes.

Not true - most new phones use digital spread spectrum, splitting the signal into packets sent on different frequencies, and digitally encrypted. You'd have to monitor several channels, and even if you put it all together you'd have digital noise that can't readily be turned back into human voices. Unless you're a politician, celebrity, or someone law enforcement is seriously after, it's very unlikely handset-to-base communications can be intercepted. Of course, if it all feeds into a wire going to a telephone pole, it can still be easily wiretapped. Also, the person you're talking to may have an old analog cordless phone that can be listened to with a basic scanner or another cordless phone tuned to the same channel.

Umm...while the DSS nature of the cordless phones may make it harder for those with consumer scanners to listen in, the codes are deterministic (if not, the base and handset would never syncronize) and not all that involved or secure. As a matter of fact, another like unit is the easiest thing to hack into it. But in most cases if someone wants to be serrupticious even HARD WIRED phones are incredibly vulnerable. Analog phone wiring is rarely secured very well.

The jacks labeled as #2 were likely for a second phone line. If you have not arranged otherwise with the phone company, the second line should be deactivated. If you wish to convert those #2 jacks to your #1 line, merely copy the connections you see on your working #1 jack, else let it go. Its not hurting anything, and these #2 jacks could come in handy should you decide to get a second line.