I really couldn't work out which was the best forum to post in, so I hope I have guessed right!

I will have two telephone lines. One from Virgin cable (coming soon), and one from BT which also has an ADSL service running over it.

What I would like to acheive is that we could use either line from any room, with the option at times to only have one room able to make and receive calls from the Virgin line. I would also like an internal call facility (to save me yelling to my husband when his dinner is ready) Ideally we could tell which line the call was coming in on too, and even lovelier if we could choose *which* line to make an outgoing call on.

I am willing to purchase special telephones if necessary, but the switchboard machine itself should be fairly small and light as it needs to fit in my wall-mounted distribution cupboard. Any recommendations or warnings?

Ok let me expand this question a bit (after much fruitless googling). Is it even possible to buy hard-wired small PABXs any more? I only seem to be coming up with DECT systems.

(NB I don't want to argue the pros and cons of DECT systems - fact is my husband has epileptic seizures when we have DECT devices in the house and does not have seizures when we dont. So there :P )

NEC XN120 is a cracking small PBX for the money, comes configured initially as a 3+6, or 3+8 (can't remember OTTOMH, pretty sure it's 3+8 actually).

The usual advice used to be buy a 2nd hand Panasonic off eBay but the price of new systems compared to the comparatively featureless, 20 year old systems isn't that great.

Other option is to buy a cheaper 2nd hand system, such as, oooh, maybe a Samsung 816 (I have one of those for sale as it happens ).

Thank you! Now what should I have put into Google to get those come up I guess no one was looking for them for a long time so they're on page 100 (yes I gave up by that time...)

I have just taken a look at your Samsung on Phones4Less (Google is a bit more helpful when I have an actual model number to type in), and it looks terribly complicated. Do you use that huge telephone as the actual switchboard or what?

The NEC looks more like what I was expecting to see, and probably easier to hide in my cupboard!

Do you happen to know if any of the ones you mentioned are happy with a VirginMedia phone line as well as a BT line - and if they will be unhappy with the ADSL (presumably I place the filter before the PABX)?

You don't have to use huge phones, you usually need at least 1 for programming from the handset, or you can use a PC if you have the leads and software. I'd always use at least 1 system display phone so you have easy access to all the features.


They should be, I've had various combinations of PBX's and cable\BT lines in operation. As you say, you'd need to filter the line from the ADSL as you would any analogue device, but you'd only need to filter the line to the PBX and not the extensions.

Personally I'd go for the XN120 if you have the budget for it.

I really do like the look of the XN120, and it seems to be what we're looking for. And it seems that you can program it over the LAN? That would be handy - menus save having to try and remember a load of button combinations. I don't like to reject your kind offer of a 2nd hand kit, but the NEC looks like something I could understand whereas the Samsung doesn't

Yeah, it is pretty expandable, can't see it not doing what you want in the long term, it's a good well featured system for home as well as a good base to build a decent sized business system on.


Nah, I'm not keen on the Samsungs either, hence why it's in the 'sell' pile.

It shouldn't matter who provides the line. If you can use the same bog standard phone on either line to make and receive calls then a PBX should be OK.

You may however have issues with additional services like Caller ID. As I understand it BT and Virgin use a different format of caller ID. A PBX will probably pass on the BT version but might not do so for the Virgin version.

And as you say the microfilter for the broadband goes before the PBX. In which case the PBX will never know it's there. The filter removes the ADSL signal from the phone socket on the filter so it's unlikely to cause any issues.

I have a PBX which i purchased from Ebay...

Was about £40 delivered - Some cheap thing from Hong Kong.

It supports eight extensions and three lines - I have BT line, Virgin Line and also an adapter for a VoIP line connected. This allows me to access any line from the relevant extensions. You can set it so some phones can only use one of the lines for outbound etc.

It does not support BT caller ID signaling, but does support Virgin's.

I'd steer well clear from the cheap chinese crap on ebay, it is total and utter shit and not worth a penny.

Seriously, it is utter crap, not just 'not very good', but completely rubbish. I would rather have no PBX than have one of those, they are awful quality, difficult to program, lack any features and are just rubbish.

Well, mine does what I need it too.

It was kind of you to take the trouble to post, Sean, thank you for the info.

That's great, I was just pointing out that anyone wanting one to actually work, they should avoid the chinese crap on ebay. I am truly happy that yours works for you.

I have a further question. How is the wiring usually done from the rooms to the PABX?

I was envisaging that there would be Cat 5e cable terminating in a wall socket in each room... but what happens in the distribution cupboard? Do we terminate these cables into a normal patch panel and use normal patch cables to connect from the panel to the PABX? Or what?

The PBX i have has lots of RJ11 connectors on it.

I have the three RJ11 trunk sockets connecting using normal BT plug to RJ11 cables - connecting to the lines.

Then the sockets I have RJ11 to BT Socket adaptors in there, so it has 8 normal BT sockets there... Then I just have normal phone extensions / cabling running off from there.

You could use Cat 5 cabling i guess.

Sean, let me reflect back what I think you are describing, so I can be sure I have understood.

Your rooms have normal telephone sockets on the walls

These sockets are wired with normal telephone wire, which is routed through to where your PABX lives.

Near the PABX, these telephone wires from the rooms are terminated in further normal telephone wall sockets? (this I wasn't sure about)

Between each of the telephone wall sockets and the PAPX, is a short length of telephone wire with a normal telephone plug at the wall socket end, and a RJ11 the PABX end?

Depends on your budget and how far you want to go. You can get a mini cabinet and wire the PBX into that along with the cat5's from the house. This can obviously also be used to terminate the voice and data cabling and can make it all a bit tidier.

A cheaper option would be to use a telecoms junction box to patch the cat5's through to RJ11 terminated patch leads. Any cat5's you have for any networking would have to be dealt with seperately.

The cheapest and easiest way is to simply terminate the cat5's with RJ11 plugs and connect them directly into the PBX.

Our preference - though it is not set in stone - is to make all the cat5 cabling go go from standard cat5 wall outlets to standard cat5 patch panel, and rely on what adapters we plug in to decide what we can use it for at any given time. As we change the use of our rooms fairly frequently, the attraction is that this is highly flexible at a moments' notice without actually needing faceplates changed. DH and I are not good at making connections with these tiny fiddly wires.

But as cat5 standard wiring is just a straight-through affair, shouldn't it be possible to plug any telephony device into it one end provided you have a compatible device plugged into the other and don't accidentally connect it to your router? I suppose what I could do with is telephony-compatible RJ11 to RJ45 patch cable if I am going to use the PABX. The XN120 comes with a set of wires with RJ11 ends, but they expect you to put your other ends on yourself. It would be nice if I could get some ready-made

I have just found these - http://www.bttorj45.com/BTtoRJ45patchkitsstandard.html -looks like it will do for the time being

In your case then I would use the mini cabinet I linked to above, or something similar.

If you use the cabinet the way to do it is to have a patch panel with all the cat5's from around the house terminated onto it as normal.

You then have a second patch panel with the leads you have with the XN120 terminated onto pins 4+5 (the blue pair), 1 extension per port.

Then underneath this you have your ethernet switch.

To make an outlet usable for the phone you connect a standard cat5 patch lead from the relevant extension on the patch panel to the relevant port on the field wiring patch panel. To make an outlet usable for data you connect a standard cat5 patch lead from a port on the ethernet switch to the relevant port on the field wiring patch panel.

At the outlets if you are using them for dat you would just use a standard cat5 patch cable to connect your PC etc... For phone use you can either use and adapter, such as this, or change the plugs on the phones you're using to RJ45 plugs.

Those kits you linked to will work but half of it will be a temporary sort of affair, much easier to use one of the box conns I linked to earlier as an intermediate solution if you aren;t wanting to spend on the cabinet etc... straight away.

It would be easier if I could have seen it more clearly. The photo was well out of my visual acuity range unfortunately so I couldn't really work out how it would fit in with the overall scheme.

I am in two minds about using patch panels now, because they look difficult to wire compared with individual patresses and faces. Do the wires end up getting pulled out of the back every time you try to put a new one in?

http://www.telephonesuk.co.uk/images...on_201D_10.jpg

You can get larger versions depending how many cables you have. Basically all you do is connect all the cables from the phone system to one side and then connect the cat5's to the other side of each row.

Oh thank you Lurch, but I don't think that would suit us. It will take ages doing all that fiddly wiring, and you get no flexibility at all.

Well no, as I say, the mini cabinet is the most flexible as any outlet can be configured as a data or phone point by just plugging the patch lead into a different port.

Another option which would probably suit for flexibility and cheapness would be to terminate all the cat5's onto standard cat5 outlets on the wall in a central point then just plug patch leads from a switch to the sockets you want as data and then for the phone ports just use the leads you have but put RJ45's on the bare ends. If you want the leads making up with the ends I'd be more than happy to do so for you, as long as you send them to me as it's be cheaper than me coming down there!

I have done this before on a couple of jobs as a cheap reasonably flexible alternative on smaller jobs and it works well enough.

How many points are you looking to have around the home in total?

Heh! We went way over the top in the loft conversion - could have run an entire company from there. Two CT100s four Cat 5... Hmm come to think of it, is it Cat 5 or 5e cable we have? Not sure now. Anyway two shielded Cat 5s.. All the ends are still coiled up in the back loft space and not even run down to the cupboard yet.

Subsequent rooms are not being so generously equipped, as LAN switches are so much cheaper now, and we have found out how to send TV round just one Co-ax etc etc.

So, that will be 7 rooms to have telephone, data point and TV in, and one to just have TV.

I could just end all the cupboard ends in plugs, but I think it's harder to make sure they stay adequately labelled that way so I would like to end them all in sockets of some sort. Now I am debating with myself (and my other half) whether it's tidier to place a two-gang single box in each room with one outlet being standard phone and one being the rj45 data point, but what sort of socket to end the phone lines in, in the cupboard? The cat5e connection, because it engages all the wires in the cable, would seem to be the most futureproof whichever way I look at it. For example, with the XN210, you can use ordinary phones (on the two voice wires) or special phones with more wires used. To be able to upgrade without having to remake connections other than simply using a different patch cable is attractive.