Ok.... I am not a phone person at all. I just got voluntered to do this at my company. We are looking to aquire a building across the street from our current locaton. I was having a company run 12 fiber lines underground to connect them. Now to get the phones to work I need copper and not fiber lines is what my normal phone support company is saying. He is telling me I need a multiplexer. Now is there another way of doing it.

I have an NEC digital phone system, that is not running on VoIP. I have found boxes that convert fiber to cat5 but I only get 4 pairs for the use on 1 fiber line. That is pretty minimal. Would just hooking it up to a switch not work? I am very uneducated in this and google is just confusing me more.

Thanks
Stephen

Your best bet is to listen to your phone vendor and run copper with lightning protection. While I'm not familiar with any device that simply converts fiber to "4 pairs," I would guess that they would not work with your NEC system.

You could purchase a second system and use the fiber via VoIP to tie the two systems together, depending on the NEC system you have. You could also simulate a T-1 via the fiber and do the same thing. However, your best bet would be copper lines. Hopefully, the fiber is in a conduit.

Best of luck.

The converters really don't provide four copper pairs at each end. What they do is convert two fibers to a 10/100 ethernet connection. They can't be used for your application unless you do what was suggested and install a second system using VOIP to connect them. I'd guess that properly-installed copper cable would be less expensive.

my s cents, the company i used to work for had a similar problem, they had a rented facility across the expressway with 200 employees they had 500 pairs run across a pedestrian bridge (with permission) for voice and fiber for data. its the simplest way to go