Our only DSL problems have been caused by squirrels and tree branches outside too and came on with rain. At first the phone company repair person would come and just experiment until he found a wire that hadn't been chewed into yet to switch to. Before the last time, I followed the wire up the street until I could see a long damaged section where a tree branch had fallen in front of a neighbor's house. When I pointed this out to the repair person, they decided to string new wire. We haven't had any DSL problems since.
Betsy wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net:
I now have FiOS, but previously had DSL. The only problems we had were loose or shorted wires inside the house, and bad wires outside, which were eventually fixed by Verizon /phone/ people, not the DSL guys.
To the OP: If your inside wires are old, and perhaps have loose wires, it may be best to put a splitter in as near the ONT as possible, and a single filter on the wire(s) that go from there to the phones. Use a separate run(s) to the DSL modem (can even be on the same cable, just a different pair - watch the connections). It is important that the DSL wiring be twisted pair or better. So your rewiring skills may come in handy after all. -- Best regards Han email address is invalid
Glad my DSL isn't on the voice pair (since I get it from a 3rd-party provider), and I don't have to mess with filters. Just wire up a jack to theY/B pair, and away I go. If I ever get around to refreshing the inside wiring, I'll run a direct line from demarc to computer room just on principle, but so far it hasn't made any difference.
The phone company is gonna give me probably three phone filters. There is currently only one old long wire of dubious quality. If I put put one of the filters at the *head* of that wire instead of at the phone end, and branch off with all new CAT3 cable for the DSL and the new phones, will that keep the old wiring from poisoning my DSL? (I think it might) I still need some kind of terminal strip to make the connections. I tried one of those phone blocks from Radio Shack that have screw clamp terminals that are supposed to pierce the insulation on the wires like a real 66 or 110 block. It was so unreliable I tore it out and ended up soldering the connections. (yes they are just floating in the air, but the cables are stapled nearly) Even tho' a 66 block is overkill for such a small installation, I might go with it just for reliability and reconfigurability. Heck, I might put one in my house.
No easy answer. Depends upon what you need (single location for modem, or need to plug in at differing locations) and what the phone company provides for free. In my case, I ordered a DIY kit, attached the provided filters where I had phones and PC fax modems, and my DSL modem was unable to synchronize at all. I only require my modem to be in one fixed location within my home. The phone company came out without charge, tested the line at my end, and (1) installed a splitter in the basement, (2) changed the jack in my den from a single line jack to a 2 line jack, using one of the 2 jacks for my phone and the other for the DSL modem, and (3) wired up the unused 2 wires in the cable from basement to den to connect the output of the splitter to the DSL jack on the 2 line jack. End result - no need for phone filters and consistently fully advertised DSL speed for my level of service at no additional cost to me.
So, you might just want to wait until your DSL service is turned on, install the phone filters where needed, and see whether or not you can get stable DSL service where you need it. If so, you're finished with no work and no cost. If not, then decide on a Plan B depending on your specific needs and how much the alternatives cost in time and effort.
Thanks. I appreciate what you're saying (also the analogy someone made about old water pipes) but I have to do *something* before hooking up the DSL modem because the only phone jack in the building is a wall jack wired with untwisted cable and no nearly electrical outlets. So at minimum I need to run one new cable and install a jack somewhere, near an electrical outlet. Tomorrow after church I'll open up the demarc box (I think they call 'em NID's now) and see what I have to work with there.
Part of this project is upgrading the phone system even thought it's just one line; add a phone in the kitchen and one in the pastor's office, plus leave the old phone jack out in the foyer because that's where the phone has been for the past 47 years and someone would get peeved if I move it. (I might look for a 1960's rotary dial phone to put there ;-) ) I'm thinking the DSL modem/router will go back by the sound system -- I'll put 2 jacks there and put them on different pairs from the same cable.
My whole budget is maybe $125 because that is what the phone company would charge to install 1 jack somewhere. :-)
I think I would run a phone wire to the nearest place you could put the DSL modem and then put an isolator/filter at the telephone junction box and use it to isolate all the phone lines. Then get a wireless router so you could use a computer anywhere in the Church.
zxcvbob wrote in news:7ut0s2F5mbU1 @mid.individual.net:
Think electrically (grin). If there is a bad conncetion or an almost short in the old wiring, you'd have problems if that was connnected in parallel to your neat new wiring. If you are rewiring, cut the old wire. Stick a note to the cutoffs to explain to the next person that the wires are from an old phone installation, now disconnected. I assume that there is no power connected anywhere to the old wiring, except for the phone company connections.
The DSL modem we're renting from the telco has a wireless router built-in ? it costs $1 per month more than a modem without the router. I just need to make sure I have access to the network security settings in the router because I don't know what kind they use. I'm gonna run one ethernet cable from the modem to the pastor's office so one connection will be up even when the wireless is down. I can use that loose piece of CAT5e plenum cable I found in the ceiling to do that. I have a modular plug crimper already, although I might use RJ45 wall plates to make it look tidier.
Sounds like you have a good idea of what you want, just split off the old phone wires going to the splitter from the new lines going to the modem, at the splitter itself. If things are flaky with the modem, disconnect the wires to the phones on the output of the splitter and see if things improve.
I still don't know if I want a real splitter or not, but I think I can defer that decision until I see how it works w/o it. I can temporarily disconnect the old wiring and see if the old people are OK with me moving the phone ;-)
DSL phone filters are no big deal. With them you don't even need the Y/B pair, although I solved the filter "problem" by canceling my POTS service. ;-)
Methinks that would probably set off alarms at my DSL provider, if dial tone were to show up on the line. Ma Bell won't install DSL out here, since I am a couple hundred yards outside their service circle. It would work fine, since all but the last half mile is on a fiber trunk, but they won't do it, since they are ever-so-slowly rolling out U-verse around here, and don't want to compete with themselves. So, I have to pay twice as much to a private DSL company, which rents a dry pair from Ma Bell, from my house to the their building right next door to the telephone company. It goes into the telco switch, then back out 15 feet through the basement wall, into the private DSL company's hardware.
You get what you pay for... Radio Shack stuff like that is junk, just look at what they sell as "phone wire"... Do it the way a telecom installer would, pick a 66 type or 110 type block whichever type you would prefer to use to terminate the ends of the cables...
Why on earth would you solder telephone connections, that is TOTAL overkill... If you don't want to buy a punch block to connect the cables just use a couple of scotchlok insulation displacement connectors to take care of it...
You were concerned about the quality of the connections at other locations in your wiring, you said some were wires twisted together with masking tape etc., replace any existing connections with the scotchlok connectors and you will be fine... Often the "problems" with old wiring have more to do with the loose connections where it is spliced than the actual quality of the wiring itself...
Oh, I wasn't suggesting that you connect them together. ;-) If there were another DSL provider I'd likely dump ma, too.
The "dry pair" doesn't go through fiber? ...and you get decent DSL speed out of it? Apparently that's our problem. The phone line is too long for higher speeds.
Life is a challenge, but it beats the alternatives. ;-)
I presume the 'dry pair' is theoretical, where it goes through the copper/fiber converters on each end. All that means is that telco doesn't add dial tone to the line at their switch. The fiber run down the big road replaced a honking big old-style trunk line that had several hundred actual copper pair on it. Now it is about a 4-inch orange tube with I dunno how many fibers running down it, feeding fiber to copper converters where the side roads branch off. For the rich neighborhoods that can afford Uverse, they extended the fiber down the side roads to the service pedestals at the entry to each subdivision, or however close to the household drops they get. I guess they looked at my blue collar/retiree neighborhood, and decided we weren't worth it. (Not that I would sign up for Uverse anyway- I don't want my internet/phone/TV all riding the same connection. Too expensive, and I like redundancy.)
But to answer your question- yeah, I get reliable 384, the cheapest connection this 3rd party company offers, 43 bucks or so a month. If ma bell came out here, I could get 2 or 3 times faster for the same price, or the same 384 for twenty bucks a month.
You don't need the yel/blk pair anyway unless you're using a key system type of PBX or something like that. For POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) it's all done on two wires, the tip and ring wires, which are red and green. Blk is for Gnd and yellow is for carrying the voltage to be used for the lights on the key system.
I'd sign up for it in a nanosecond. I *hate* Dish, but cable-TV is really the pits here (Charter), if I could get it. I wouldn't mind TV and cable in the same pipe. I don't have a land-line now, so that's not an issue.
Oh, that does suck. We just had to "downgrade" to 768K. I think it's $20, but there may be another $5 on top of that since we dropped the voice service (that we didn't connect a phone to anyway).
Yes, I understand that. "Aim" indicated that he had both pairs because he didn't us Ma Bell for DSL. I mentioned that the filters weren't a big deal either, assuming the same pair for DSL and voice. ....especially so, after canceling voice service. ;-)
Yeah, I know that now. I soldered the wires a few years ago because I wanted them to WORK, dammit. ;-) This was in my house, with a mixture of cables with all different wire gauges. When I finish wiring the church up with a 66-block, I'll probably redo my house the same way. Those blocks may be overkill but they are sure inexpensive now.
I do have another question about DSL filters/splitters. Is there any difference really between a$30+ splitter (like the one I linked to yesterday) and a $3 filter (like this one: ), other than the packaging and economy of scale? They sell many thousands of filters vs. dozens of splitters. Do the splitters condition the ADSL port, or is it just fed straight through from the LINE port, and the TEL port is low-pass filtered? Seems like I could use one cheapie filter at the distribution block to service the whole voice line, and I don't have to worry about someone plugging in an old phone without the filter and poisoning the DSL signal.
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