More Retro Phone Shennanigans

So as much as I liked the retro phone on my desk, it’s just not super practical for regular use. However I still love it and wanted to be able to use/see it regularly. So I retired the red phone from my desk and replaced it with a Polycom VVX450 with a sidecar, and moved the red phone to my bedroom. Of course the phone isn’t just a statement piece, it has to actually function. But that presents another issue - I don’t have any Ethernet in the bedroom to put an ATA, so how am I going to do this? That left some options:

• Find a wifi ATA that supports pulse dialing (good luck)
• Glue a wifi-to-ethernet bridge to my existing ATA (janky)
• Repurpose the existing house phone wiring as Ethernet and run the ATA over that

Wait a minute… we already have phone wiring in the bedroom - why not just run POTS over it like it was meant to?

Well that’s exactly what I did. I first started by checking if the wires even were still good and went to the demarcation point in the basement. I used a toner to check and verify. To my surprise, they were intact the whole way through.

Since the phone already had an RJ-45 crimped on it, and RJ11 is unobtanium at most hardware stores anymore, I just decided to keep it RJ45 through-and-through. I punched the orange pair into a cat5 keystone and mounted it up in the wall.

Next up was the demarcation point in the basement. After freeing some wires, I found the orange pair and punched it into another keystone. This would get plugged into a cat5 cable going back to my networking area with the ATA.

Once connected, I picked up the receiver and to my absolute surprise I got a dialtone. It works! Before I closed it all up I was curious about actually running Ethernet over the wiring and decided it’s far too long to even attempt that - I would not trust 239’ of phone wiring to carry even 100mbit, let alone PoE.

This was all fun, but now I have new issues, like my stuffed octopus trying to call her boyfriend! The long distance rates from here to the Atlantic ocean are insane!