How to install a Nortel Meridian 6 x 16 phone system

Installation of a Nortel Business Telephone System is quite easy and inexpensive and should cost you under $50
If you learn the system and install it yourself your not just saving yourself the hiring of a onetime installation, its more of a lifetime investment and you won't have to call the phoneguy out to charge you an arm and a leg every time a new employee is added or a new phone line is added.. you will be able to easily understand and handle it all saving lots of money and peace of mind.
You will most likely only need 1 specialized tool to install a Nortel phone system, You will need a 66 punch down tool, readily available at any Home Depot, Lowe's or your local hardware store and they range in price from $10 for the cheapest brand and $45 for the top of the line brand. Any that you will purchase will be sufficient enough as long as the blade is not extremely old. They sell some nice ones on okay for $14.99. Ok so you got the only tool you need. Now you just need a 25 Pair Female Amphenol connector, which we will discuss later and you'll need a little patience anda couplehours of time.
The Nortel system is so easy to install because it is a Digital system and only requires 1 pair of wire to run each phone. Most phone cables that are ran throughout your office have 4 pairs of wire in them and you will only need 1 of those pairs for each phone set you will install. The phones will work with either standard, Cat 3 Voice cabling or with Cat 5 Data cabling. Cat 3 or Cat 5 cable willperform exactly the same as the other as far as your phone system is concerned. So assuming you have a previously occupied office space the cabling is likely in place and you will reuse whatever your predecessors had connected to the phone jacks and run back to the phone closet.
If you are building out your office from scratch you can run your own cabling as a box of 1,000 ft isaround $50 at Home Depot or Lowe's or you can hire someone to do all of the cabling for you and expect to pay about $75 per wire run. Depending on your area you may also be required to pull a low voltage permit when wiring new construction, which would require you to hire someone with a low voltage license to do it. If you are installing the system in an existing, previously occupied officehopefully all of your phone cabling is in place and running back to the phone closet, if not just lift up some ceiling tiles and have some fun throwing around cables dropping them down where you please.
THE PHONE CLOSET
The majority of offices will have a dedicated space for their Phone Closet which is often shared with the furnace, water heater, network hub and other office necessities that you would like to hide from everyday view. Usually your phone service provider has their dial tone geing into your office suite into this closet. This location is called the D-Mark, where your phone gepany brings your phone lines into your office suite. You will most likely be hanging the phone system on the wall in a phone closet next to the D-Mark, If not just choose any location that has a power outlet. If the cabling throughout the office is already in place then you will have to hang the system processor on the wall next to this spot. On residential houses the D-Mark is on the outside of the house and you obviously can't hang the phone system there so you would need to extend the D-Mark by running a cable from the D-Mark into your house next to where you want to hang the phone system on the wall. effectively extending the D-Mark and carrying the phone lines into the phone system processor.
Hopefully Your phone service provider will install what is called a Smartjack as your D-Mark. this will make the dialtone connections all modular (plug and play) and a breeze to install.
If you have a Smartjack D-Mark, simply take any basic phone cord and plug it into Line 1 on the Smartjack, this will be labeled as your main phone number on the Smartjack, Take the other end and plug it into the Port numbered 1 on the left side of your Meridian 6 x 16 phone system processor box. you will see ports numbered 1-6... whatever you plug into there will begee lines 1-6 in your phone system. Its that easy! you have dialtone to the system, now to easily get the phones connected to the system and up and running.
You will need a 25 Pair, Female Amphenol Connector Plug to connect the stations into the phone system. These can be found on lots of old phone boards or they can be purchased at any Telege Wharehouse for $4 each.. This Large Amphenol plug will connect into the Processor Box. The other end which has the 25 pair tail on it will be terminated and connected next to the station cables that are running throughout the office. A 66 punch down block will hold the wires and tie them together.
On the 25 pair female amphenol connector the wires punched down next to the following colors will be the following extensions,
blue pair ext. 21orange pair ext. 22green pair ext. 23brown pair ext. 24grey pair ext. 25etc..
each color has 2 wires in the pair, This system is not polarity sensitive so don't worry about the order of the dominant color and the white partner of the pair
Use your 66 punchdown tool to connect the station wires to the phone system by terminating the wires onto a 66 punchdown block. The 66 punch down block is a tall, skinny block with 50 rows wide of metal pins and 4 vertical columns of metal pins. There are most likely several 66 blocks already hanging on the wall in the phone room if it is an existing office space. Plug the Female Amphenol connector plug into the phone system processor on the one end and connect the pairs from the open end of the 25 pair amphenol cable to the 66 punch down block going down the column. blue pair goes to rows 1 and 2 on column 1; orange pair goes to rows 3 and 4 on column 1 etc. all the amphenol pairs will go all they way down column 1 .. then on the column next to them punch down the pairs from the phone cabling that is running from your phone jacks in the office to the phone room. The phone station pair goes to row 1 and 2 on column 2.. etc.. all the way down column 2. Hopefully the jacks are labeled so you know which wires run where, which will make it easier, if not just punch down all of the blue pairs next to the amphenol pairs and see what works and what doesen't, you can swap extension #'s later if you'd like certain locations to be certain extension numbers.

The last 2 row of pins on the punch down block are to connect Music on Hold into the system. On the Amphenol connector use the 25th pair which is the grey/violet and violet/grey pair and then connect your ground and source wires to them going from a 1/8th plug microphone output of your radio, CD Player or other device. You can also purchase a 1/8th plug to alligator clips at Radio Shack and just clip them on to the metal pins next to the violet/ grey pair to establish the connection.

Thats it! Might sound confusing, but once you start and play with the wires and get a better grasp it is quite easy. Now programming is the fun part.