Confessions of a Radio Shack Flunkie

DIY 2-line phone services

Everyone knows that only geeks work at Radio Shack. I should know, I worked as a geek-for-hire for several years. We Radio Shack geeks never ask questions like “will the cable company charge me more for splitting the signal off into my bedroom?” or “will the phone company make me pay extra for receiving faxes?” We know better. (In case you don’t know, you pay the cable company and the phone company for no more than simple services - what you do with each service after it’s reached your house is usually up to you and none of their darn business if you do the work yourself.)

One of the best kept secrets in the phone business is the fact that while most houses in the country are wired with four-wire telephone cable, a standard single phone line only uses TWO wires. So when your kid is addicted to Ultima Online and you’re ready for a second phone line to come into your house, you don’t HAVE to pay extortionate fees to have new jacks for the second line inside your house. You probably already have adequate wiring to all the jacks in your home. All you have to do is have the phone company run the service up to the box (or demarc - short for demarcation) on the outside of your house. Armed with a couple of screwdrivers and some needle-nose pliers, you can take it from there.

If you watch the phone man, you’ll know exactly where the demarc is on your house - or if you recently painted the outside of your house, you probably remember having to paint around the box. All you have to do, once the phone guy is done with his part of the deal, is take the two wires for the new service and connect them to the two unused terminals where your existing phone line is connected. Don’t ask me why it is that the phone box is sealed with a phillips head screw but the phone line terminals use slotted screws - some things are still a mystery, even to Radio Shack Geeks.

The phone wiring in a typical post-50’s home will contain four wires - black, yellow, red, and green. The typical single phone line will use the red and the green wires, while the black and yellow wires just sit there being useless. What you will have to do to enable 2 lines of phone service to all your existing jacks is to connect the red and green incoming service wires of the new phone line to the black and yellow wires on the existing wiring in your home.

To use both lines inside from the same jack, go to Radio Shack and get a 2-line splitter or a “duplex jack.” This splitter will have a modular plug on one end that fits into your existing phone jack, and three modular jacks that you can plug phones into - a jack for line 1, a jack for line 2, and a jack for lines 1 AND 2, just in case you have a 2-line phone. You simply plug one of these splitters into Junior’s phone jack and plug his computer modem into “line 2” and presto - he can play Ultima Online till his internet connection dies or his bed time rolls around…

Oh, when you talk to the phone company about installing a second line, think about how you intend to use the line. In our house, the second line does nothing but make a local call to an ISP. If your second line will have a single simple function like this, be sure to specify when you order it that you require no long distance services, no call-waiting (ew, talk about “game over”) and no other special services that your area phone company might assume everyone wants with a phone line. You can save yourself a few dollars that way.

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