Home patch panel (click to enlarge)

Today was the day I finally made the break with Qwest. I've been paying twice what I would for Vonage's best service and not getting as many features. I've had Vonage as my business line for a few years now and have been happy with it so I decided I'd transfer the main number to Vonage as well and say goodbye to my ILEC.

I get my broadband access from Comcast and it's been pretty reliable. The few problems I've had have been DNS and that doesn't affect VoIP--it kept right on working. The other big concern is power outages, but I've got my stuff on UPS--although I'm not sure about Comcast.

I'll let you know how the experiment goes.

A comment from Cid Dennis made me think I maybe ought to say something about what I did to hook it up. First, I went outside and disconnected the Qwest lines coming into the house (there's an RJ11 jack in the box on the side of the house) so that i wouldn't be feeding any phone calls out to their network. Then I hooked an RJ11 jack to some phone wire and fed it straight into the punch down block that feeds my home patch panel (the punch down blocks in the lower left corner of the photo). If you don't have a punch down block of some sort, your phone lines are probably daisy chained. In that case, feeding phone signal into any point in the daisy chain will light up all the phone jacks in the house.