SG Broadband Community

I've been having a lot of problems with my DSL since about December. At around that time, Pac Bell upgraded my service to a higher rate, but I've been having frequent disconnect problems. I finally had AT&T come out to look at it and it seems the problem is in my home wiring. AT&T's speed test seems to indicate I'm getting about 2.5MB/Sec down. The CO is about 1.5 miles away.

They used some kind of signal analyzer at the DMARC and then again on the wire going into my DSL Model and they saw many more errors at the DSL modem. At the DMARC the signal looked very good. One thing they found was that I had just a Y and a filter (rather than a splitter) at the DSL modem (that is what they gave me when they installed my DSL 6-7 years ago now). They replaced that with proper splitter (with I guess a high pass filter for the DSL and a low pass filter for the phone), but they still saw errors. At that point, they declared the problem was my wiring and they went on their merry way.

So, my thought is that I need to move the splitter to the DMARC and run a new wire directly from the DMARC to my office (about 20-25 feet, perhaps 50 by the time I get done routing the wire). I don't think the house wiring is twisted pair (just good old red/green/yellow/black) so perhaps that was part of my problem.

Since the splitter won't fit inside the DMARC, would it be OK to bring the line directly into my office on one twisted pair, feed that into the splitter and then send the phone signal back up another twisted pair to the DMARC and feed it back into the rest of the house?

There are a total of 3-phones plus a Tivo and a fax machine on the phone side of the line. Is there some reason why a single splitter would not be sufficient to handle all of those devices? Is there some sort of super whole-house filter that would do a better job? A filter is a filter, right?

I'm currently running with a jury-rig setup with the splitter hanging off the DMARC and a CAT-5 wire from the splitter going directly from there to the DSL modem and it seems to work, although I'm going to give it a day or two before I move to make it permanent.

Thanks,

Mark Z.

mzellers wrote:
They used some kind of signal analyzer at the DMARC and then again on the wire going into my DSL Model and they saw many more errors at the DSL modem. At the DMARC the signal looked very good. One thing they found was that I had just a Y and a filter (rather than a splitter) at the DSL modem (that is what they gave me when they installed my DSL 6-7 years ago now). They replaced that with proper splitter (with I guess a high pass filter for the DSL and a low pass filter for the phone), but they still saw errors. At that point, they declared the problem was my wiring and they went on their merry way.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-dsl-filter.htm

filter and splitting the line do the same thing, they keep dsl signal off the phones. This will not improve DSL signal, just keep sound on phone from being corrupted.

Sound slike your phone tech needs to go back to training class to me.

So, my thought is that I need to move the splitter to the DMARC and run a new wire directly from the DMARC to my office (about 20-25 feet, perhaps 50 by the time I get done routing the wire). I don't think the house wiring is twisted pair (just good old red/green/yellow/black) so perhaps that was part of my problem.

ALL phone wiring is twisted pair, unless you are into the fiber hardline. You filter out outside interference [such as broadcast tv signals, FM radio signals, etc.] in one of two ways, with shielding like on coax cable, or twisting the pair of wires like with phone. If you have untwisted, unshielded wires, you better be using them for power only or for VERY short distances.

Since the splitter won't fit inside the DMARC, would it be OK to bring the line directly into my office on one twisted pair, feed that into the splitter and then send the phone signal back up another twisted pair to the DMARC and feed it back into the rest of the house?

Each wire should have 2 pairs in it from what you described. The green and red pair and the yellow and black pair. If one pair is erroring out [red/green is primary] its pretty much standard practice to use the second pair [yellow/black] unless you have a dual line phone system and the other pair is in use for it on that outlet. I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do here, but there is enough voltage on your phone line to run several outlets so you should be fine.


In order to do this you would locate the 2 pairs at the DMARC and remove red/green add in yellow/black tot he central splice point, then go to the outlet, and disconnect red/green, and connect the yellow/black pair where they were on the outlet, yes the color coordination will not be right, but it works fine if you do it right.