Since it is almost New Years, I will add in what may be the last post on this for 2005.
An analog phone is most any phone that would plug into your home type wiring if their was no central control unit installed your house, only the dial tones from the phone company. An analog phone would use one pair of wires if it was a single line phone, and would use two pairs of wires if it was a two line phone and three pairs of wires if it was a three line phone and four pairs of wires if it was a four line phone.
If you go to you local office supply store they probably sell one line, two line, three line and four line phones and all this means is that you could put one line on hold and pick up a second line, etc. These are popular where a teenager has one line and the house has one line and a small business in the house has one line.
You can make the teenager's line ring ONLY in their room, the business line ring only in the office and the house line ring EVERYWHERE.
Most digital phones use only one pair of wires to carry the power (usually 24 or 48 volts DC) to the phone in addition to the 1s and 0s that are data to tell which button to blink slowly on line one showing that it is on hold, which button to be steady on to show that someone else is using that line, etc. And there are 1s and 0s which are digitally coded data of your voice. The digital phone converts those 1s and 0s back into your voice.
Some older digital phones such as the Avaya/Lucent/AT&T Partner use two pairs of wires to carry the voice and data and power as at the time they were first released, AT&T hadn't invented a way to do it all on one pair of wires.
Other Digital phones such as Toshiba, Samsung, Norstar, etc. use only one pair of wires as they had the technology when released to carry a digital talkpath, 24 or 48 volts DC and the data to make the buttons on the phone be the correct color and be steady or blink appropriately.
The Avaya/Lucent/AT&T Legend phones also used two pair to carry the same information as the Partner but those systems could go to much larger sizes than the Partner.
As I have never installed a Definity, I don't know how many pairs of wires the digital Definity phones use. The system of course can have single line phones in it. Those phones can have an xxxx part number similar to the xxxx part numbers on other Definity digital phones.
An easy way to tell what kind of a phone you have is to go to
www.Google.com and type the model number in the search bar. For instance a Definity 6416 is a digital display phone while a Definity 6221 is a non-display analog (single line) phone that is exactly the same color. If you are confused about which phones you have you can look them up in Google in seconds.
To sum up, you have to have a list of what model phones you have and google them to know that they are digital or analog. The digital phones will only work on pairs that are punched down on cable that are connected to Definity digital circuit cards. The single line phones like the 6221 will only work on cables punched down from a Definity analog circuit card.
Once you have your list googled, you can look at the tabs on the circuit cards and google them. You will find out how many digital phones you can run, how many single line phones you can run, etc.
It would probably be very foolish not to pay someone to come out and teach you and a couple other people to program the system. If you are sick or on leave, someone else can pinch hit. If you can't remember something, three heads are better than one.
With this in tow, why don't you come up with specific questions after you have googled your list of phone and your list of circuit cards. Some newer phones will be Definity phones, but they will only work if your software is more current than when the system is installed.
If you can come up with solid questions, people on the board can give you specific answers.
Have a Happy New Year and G-D Bless the service people who are certainly giving of their time and earning less and protecting our butts.
