You are responsible for your telephone services. In addition, you are required to have telephone services. Most people have a cellular phone, and that would work just fine. You do not need to have a home phone line, although this is a choice depending on what you want. Verizon who owns the POTS (Plain Ordinary Telephone Service) lines are shutting down their network, and will not support POTS phone services. With that said, there will be no telephone jacks in the residence. If you wish to have a home telephone line, you must use the choice options below.
If you are technically savvy, then you can acquire a desk SIP phone, an ATA, or a Wifi Phone. If you choose a desk SIP phone, you should contact me and let me know which jack will need POE. Many desk phones will not come with a power adapter, and will require POE to work. Since not all of the jacks are POE, I have to make adjustments in the communications room which you do not have access to. The cable will be yellow to let anyone else in the room to know that line is POE required. Your access point, and control panel both use POE, so you would only have 2 other ports for POE. You can also use an ATA. Once you plug in the ATA, find your IP address, and setup the credentials, you would have phone service. You would just need to plug the phone into the ATA, and make calls. And with the Wifi phone, you would simply connect to the wifi network, enter your credentials via the web panel from the phone, and everything should work. In either of these 3 options, I would recommend a static LAN address to make it easier to configure in the future.
If the above paragraph intimidates you, then you should consider using an ATA from a company that would configure everything for you. Such services will include Ooma, or Vonage from Home. These providers will send you an ATA where you would be able to make any adjustments from a hopefully friendly web account. In the case of Ooma, you may have to provide the ATA’s MAC address, but this is clearly identified on the bottom of the ATA. In the case of Ooma, I will recommend that you consider using their DECT phones, and place one where needed in the home.