Phone Jack

The four wires are color coded and the jack will have the colors indicated near the screw terminals. The danger of electrical shock is very low. If the phone rings when you are across the line you may get a little buzz. How hard will it be for you to do this? I don't know you but it is a low difficulty repair.

Tom

Not soldered. Residential style jacks have screw terminals; there are some commercial style modular jacks but unless your house was wired by a nutcase* you won't have that.

Phone lines are separately powered from your house electricity. That's why, if you have an old-style "POTS" phone, it'll still work when the power goes out.

There's about 48V standing on the line, which only hurts if you accidentally stick yourself with two wires (I've worked on phones often enough to do that, for my sins). Even then it only hurts, but doesn't harm. Ring voltage is 120V, so you'll feel it with a vengence.

If it worries you, unplug the phone at the entrance jack.

For _you_? I don't know -- I've seen the stuff of horror stories done by beginners.

You can't screw up anything permanently beyond that one jack -- the worst you could do would be to grab the cable and manage to pull it out of the wall, hard enough to damage your in-house wiring. You'd almost have to do that on purpose, though. Even shorting the wires together won't damage anything; it'll just bring down your phone service until you figure it out.

Go slow, put everything back the way you found it, and you should be OK.

Note that your problem is a loose connection that may not be at the jack

-- replace the jack, try it out, and if you still have a problem you'll need to find the other end of the wire (there's probably a break-out block close to the house entry point) and check connections there.

• I have those, so I can put a bazzilion jacks in at each station -- but I'm widely recognized as a nutcase.

Is there break out box NID safe to disconnect and reconnect wires at?

Any electrical issues there?

I noticed a small grey plastic box that is near the NID. Is that the external phone line box?

Yes, of course. When the telco service guy told you it was all OK to the box, he knew that because he disconnected your house wiring (it's a clearly marked plug inside most boxes that accomplishes this) to do the test.

In addition to the house wiring, your phoneset noise COULD be caused by the phone-to-the-wall wire as well.

I'm kinda using "external interface" and "NID" interchangably. The NID (or whatever it's called) should have a regular old phone plug in it, with a little pivoting hood that captures the plug and hides it. Look for a quarter-circle thingy with a tiny handle and an arc-shaped slot in it. Better yet, Google around until you find a picture.

Pivot the hood away, unplug the plug, and your house is now disconnected from the network. The idea is that the NID gives a very clear demarcation between the phone company's stuff and your stuff -- everything that's permanently attached to the NID is the phone company's responsibility; the rest is yours.

Hello,

I am just lurking around here, but could it be the phone itself ?

Hello,

I am just lurking around here, but could it be the phone itself ? I had static on a phone, it was the handset cord.

-- Wayne

I agree with you Wayne, 95% of the time it's the phone handset cord causing the problem that the OP describes. It would be helpful if a different phone was used to test the jack.