Telephony issue

[Harry Bloomfield]

A friend of mine has an issue with his phones, just looking for ideas to try to fix it.

He has copper broadband on the line. For years there has sometimes appeared an echo when you talking to him, which makes it impossible to converse. Sometimes when I ring there is a crackle to the ring, but no crackle when he answers. Quiet Line test indicated quiet.

Last week he got a new set of phones, with built in nuisance caller filter. Now he is complaining the audio is terrible, noisy, buzzing, unusable. I can hear a little of it, when he rings me. He tested the phone to phone (internal call) noise and suggested there was none.

His broadband speed he suggests is stable at around 9meg, but I have not checked it. The filter is a splitter built into the Master Socket.

Current plan is to have him bring his new phones here, so I can test them on my line. Maybe give him a plug in filter to try at home to see what difference that makes to his noises.

[Brian Gaff]

Hmm, well, who is he with. Let me guess Talk Talk? If so there are a lot of people with the echo issue. I think they are using voip a lot and it does make for an echo. the noises and the ringing burble sound like actual corrosion on the wires or maybe ingress of water. Are they overground or underground to the houses?

I'm surprised that the internet is not always renegotiating its connection though it doees depend on the distance to the multiplexer in use. Brian

[Harry Bloomfield]

Brian Gaff was thinking very hard :

He was with TT, but now with Plusnet the same as me. I would not expect VOIP for a local call, via the same exchange, but what do I know?

I would suggest his cable is all underground from cabinet to his house, but maybe a mixture from there to the exchange.

He is not very savvy on tech stuff, so I dare not ask him to check how long his router remains connected for. I suppose I could set up a persistent ping to his router's IP.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Almost certainly nothing to do with his phones or local end cables. An echo is a delay of some sort introduced by electronics further down the line.

[Harry Bloomfield]

It happens that Dave Plowman (News) formulated :

I agree on that. Just the reported noise and his odd crackle noise to sort out.

[alan_m]

I've had noisy lines in the past and a temporary cure has often been to ring my own land line number number from my mobile. The act of ringing cures the noise for a short period.

Has he tried disconnecting his broadband to see if the phone behaves?

Has he tried removing the faceplate from the master socket and plugging the phone directly into the connector behind the face plate?

[dennis]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was. If they use VoIP then they could well start at the card in the exchange. Marconi were doing cards for the DSLAM that did VoIP and DSL. The VoIP went over ethernet or 2M links depending on what the customer wanted. That was years ago so its quite possible TT use them if they have their own DSLAMs in the exchange/green box.

[T i m]

Stepdaughter is with TT and we get the echo on the phone to her often.

Cheers, T i m

[The Natural Philosopher]

I had a lot of this here, [plus inability to dial out

In the end they changed the circuit to a different card at the exchange

- dead port.

[Harry Bloomfield]

alan_m explained :

A bit beyond his tech and diagnostic abilities :o)

[Pamela]

I often get a low volume when listening to someone who's on Talktalk. It's quite sigificant amount below normal.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Harry Bloomfield expressed precisely :

... and, when he unplugged the router, the noises on the line stopped. I went round with some spare splitter/filters, but found he had used a splitter in his master socket, going one outlet to a filter, the other straight to his phone. In other words, his phone was bypassing the filter completely, hence the apparent noise on the line.

[dennis]

8<

A decent phone won't let DSL signals make a noise. However phones being picked up affects the dsl signal and can cause dropouts.

[jrwalliker]

I have heard background noise on "decent" phones when connecting to a dsl line without a filter. Whether a phone is "decent" does not seem to be correlated with cost. The one I had problems with was BT branded, but it demodulated rf very efficiently. No doubt an extra penny on the BOM cost could have fixed the problem.

John