Saturday, September 09, 2006

Vonage and Tivo: Success at Last

For those of you struggling to get your Tivo boxes to dial out and make their daily calls via a Vonage or VOIP phone line... after years of struggle, I solved the problem in 5 minutes.

Go buy an RCA Wireless Modem Jack. (Be sure it's the MODEM jack, not the PHONE jack). Mine is model RC930. It's a wireless phone jack that runs via your power outlets. I'm currently NOT using my in-home phone wiring for Vonage, so this worked wonderfully.

Plug the base into your Vonage phone box. Then plug a phone into the base. (I have a VTech cordless 5.8 GHz phone with 3 handsets). Then take the remote piece of the wireless phone jack and plug it into an outlet near your Tivo. Set up the jacks as instructed, then plug the Tivo into the remote jack.

Voila. My Tivo dialed out with no modifications to the dialing prefix, and my phones are all working.

YEARS, I've struggled with this! All I needed was 5 minutes of installation time, a trip to Best Buy, and eighty bucks. Here's a link to the one I bought:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1051384177248&type=product

I've had no interference with my wireless phones or with my 802.11g wireless network thus far.

Joy!