Do splitters work with office phones/extensions?

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GeneralJabroni

GeneralJabroni

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In our office, we have too many phones and people and not enough phone lines on the wall. Our phones are just like this one.
Will a simple splitter solve our problems, or do we need to get inside that wall and throw some more cables?

Thanks in advance!
 
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Snipergod87
These are PoE phones, you would need to split the ethernet connection and still provide enough power for both phones to operate and you would need a new phone number of course for the new phones. A professional solution would be to run more wires to your PoE enabled switch, and not use splitters+power adapters.
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Snipergod87

Snipergod87

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These are PoE phones, you would need to split the ethernet connection and still provide enough power for both phones to operate and you would need a new phone number of course for the new phones. A professional solution would be to run more wires to your PoE enabled switch, and not use splitters+power adapters.
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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Depends what you mean splitter, not some simple wiring hack. Now if you mean a small switch then maybe. The problem is these phones are PoE so they can also get their power from the wall jack. So you could buy poe switches to add more ports or you can use external power blocks to provide power to the phone.
Now a very non standard thing you can do (assuming you have external power) is to plug a second phone into the first one. There is a second lan port on these devices used normally to plug a PC into but you can plug a second ip phone into it. Now you may be able to daisy chain even more phones but I have never tried putting more than a single device behind a cisco phone.

The big "but" here depends on how the switches are configured behind this, If the phones are using stuff like LLDP to negotiate voice vlans or you have other feature like 802.1x enabled on the ports then likely you will have to run more cables or change the way you run your voice network.
 
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Snipergod87

Snipergod87

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Typically with PoE phones, the phone will not pass power to the second device plugged into it, so you would need a PoE injector, but you are completely correct in regards to VLAN's
 
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bill001g

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Maybe I was not real clear but that is exactly what I meant when I said "(assuming you have external power)". These phones can run with the 5volt wall wart things or via the PoE

 
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GeneralJabroni

GeneralJabroni

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bill001g, I just checked and they DO have an RJ45 connector on the back that says "PC". That helps a lot!
As for using a switch... any managed switch will do?

PS: They all have an external power supply cable so don't worry about PoE.
 
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bill001g

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It depends how your network is setup if you need managed or unmanaged. Of course managed always gives you more options so if money is not a big concern it may give you more flexibility.

I am going to bet you can use unmanged if you have a very simple network. The time you would have to have a manged switch was if you did stuff like put the phones and the PC on different vlans. The switch has to be pretty smart if you want to use the features like plugging a PC into the back of a PC and having the phone and the switch put the PC on the proper vlan.

 
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GeneralJabroni

GeneralJabroni

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We just need a few so money really isn't much of an issue. I'll buy some managed switches and see how that works.

Thanks a lot, guys! I really thought we had to tear the floor and throw more lines.
 
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electropura21

Mar 30, 2019
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Hey Everyone!

I know this thread is old, but I've found myself with a nearly identical problem, and thought I'd start here first. Hopefully, you all may still be around for input.

THE SHORT QUESTION:
Reviewing all of the above, GeneralJabroni was able to solve his problem (with help from the community) by connecting his phones together via daisy-chain, and not worrying about the phones being PoE because his phones all had an external power supply.

The phones we are using, however, do not come with an external power supply. It was suggested that in this case, using a PoE injector should do the job.

I'm pretty novice to this, so apologies in advance if I misspeak. My understanding about the general purpose of PoE injectors is to boost power of connections that may need to travel long distances. (Again, I'm sure its a lot more than this).

So my question is: Is there any specific advice on how to do this correctly? I have this awful feeling that if I do this wrong, I'm going to end up frying our phone system.

(Yes, it's a non-professional solution. But honestly, I'm hoping we can get this to work, since we don't really need a new dedicated extension... just another phone capable of accessing any of the 3 available lines in the network. As predicted the daisy-chain method didn't work for us since there is not enough PoE power for both phones.).

Thanks in advance!
 
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bill001g

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PoE is not used to boost power it is used to provide the power. There should be no power coming into the poe injectors other than power it gets from the wall.

In theory it should work. Lets say you built a box and put a poe injector in it and you put the phone in it. Externally you would only see a ethernet port and a power cord going into this magic box. So in effect you put a power cord on your phone.

There are 2 types of PoE injectors. 802.3 based ones and passive ones. Passive ones are the most risk since they send power out all the time. In most cases they use 12 or 24 volt which is much less risk than the 48 volt systems. These you must make sure you only plug a poe capabile device into the output jack. 802.3af devices only put power out when the remote device requests it. These are safer because if you would plug the wrong device it would not get power because it does not know how to request it.

You must match the power injectors to your phones. The 802.3 ones are based on the standard most passive one are proprietary to the phone manufacture.
 
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