dialup issues

Nope. It depends on how the line is run. If you have copper pair going all the way back to the CO (central office), then you'll probably do ok for 56kbits/sec dialup. However, if your line is delivered via an ISDN pair gain split or SLC (subscriber line constipator), you'll see only about 24Kbit/sec.

You should have kept the residential line, and move the business number to it. Too late.

You can't hear the noise on a quiet line. You'll need an instrument to measure the residual noise level. However, I don't think that's the problem.

No. The most likely culprits are:

1. Bridged taps.
2. Equalizers left in the line from previous service owner.
3. Rotten connections on the poles (noise and high loop resistance).
4. Excessive crosstalk from other services in the bundle.
5. AM Radio station pickup.
6. Whatever else I forgot.

I've seen pairs in the same bundle, where most work just fine, but where one or two pairs are garbage or worse. I recently had that on my home POTS pair, which required considerable effort on the part of Ma Bell to untangle the mess they created.

I've also seen intermittent problems, where 56K was possible during daylight hours, but would magically drop to 26K after midnight. That turned out to be AT&T running "preventive maintenance" tests and forgetting to turn off the tones and sweeps.

This brings back nightmares from 15 years ago. Welcome to the stone age: (Most of the links are dead.... Oh well). Using a USR modem and this method, I've been able to identify screwed up phone lines fairly easily.

I hate to point out the obvious, but you can get "dry" DSL service (i.e. no voice service) for not much more than POTS voice. Then, get yourself a really cheap VoIP provider

So... inasmuch as a house's internal cabling usually has unused pairs -- would it be worth switching to another pair?

On 2/8/2013 9:22 AM, klem kedidelhopper wrote: > I plan to go to the interface to look at this but we now have a big > storm coming so for now the 26K will suffice. If plugging directly > into the interface yields a good (45K) connection on the slow line > then I realize that the problem is then in the premises and I'll have > to troubleshoot that. > > My question is if the problem is in the premises wiring what could > be the most likely cause of something like this? As I previously > mentioned I can't "hear" any problem but of course that doesn't mean > that one doesn't exist. Before I start dismantling my inside wiring > it would be nice if I had a clue as to what I was looking for. The > phone company by the way has been no help with this. > > If anyone has any ideas that they would share I would be extremely > grateful. Lenny >

FWIW, I had a problem with low DSL speed similar to yours. It turned out to be a tarnished/corroded RJ-11 wall plate jack. Once the wall plate was replaced, the problems disappeared.

Klem-

There should be a modular phone connector in the box where your phone line attaches to the house. You can isolate a problem to being inside or outside, by connecting your equipment to the outside jack, and seeing if the problem goes away.

Fred

I had a speed problem back in the day. Called the number (in india) on the bill and was told the line was fine. But they'd gladly send someone out to tell me the same thing for a fee. I poked around and discovered the direct phone number to the district manager in my town. Problem was fixed in minutes. Somebody had the switch in the wrong position back at the CO.

Definitely, if you can get the phone company to do it. In my case, the bundle was fully subscribed and there were no spare pairs. However, as cable telephony and VoIP became more popular, many people gave up their POTS lines, making alternatives available. As soon as I found one good pair that was available (tested with a TDR), I convinced the phone company to mark mine bad and switch my line to a new pair. I've also done similar swaps for customers. It's not easy, but it is possible. Oddly, the most recent repair was a general cleanup of the noisy lines between my house (near the end of the line) to the termination box (about 3/4 mile). It took one installer, 3 hours and a bucket truck to fix all the crappy connections. He did it right. I inspected the work and it was perfect. That's 30+ years of crappy POTS service fixed in 3 hrs. Cleaning up phone lines is not rocket science.

would

Unless you're making phone calls from space. ;-)

A 'Magic Jack+' plugged into the Sat router/modem attached to the Microdyne 700 wideband KU band communications system aboard the ISS, and you can have a local phone number in orbit.

Well, not always. We have corrosion IN the demarcation box, and that RJ11 needs to be replaced every couple years. This is St. Louis, MO., humid, but not insanely so. You can tell because the whole connector turns black, both the jack and most especially the plug on the pigtail, where it is really obvious because it is supposed to be clear plastic.

Jon

I've had premises-wiring problems from all sorts of causes:

- Humidity and moisture condensation in the wall outlet box (affecting a wall box located near our washing machine). Surface contamination (dirt and mold buildup) plus moisture equals leakage, which was apparently enough to cause problems.

- Corrosion of the connecting screws, wire-end ring or fork terminals, or the wire ends crimped to the terminals... again, probably due to moisture and contamination over the years.

- Loose screw-and-terminal connections in the connection boxes. In many cases the screws are coarse-thread self-tapping varieties, screwed into relatively soft plastic; over the years they can work loose or (if loosened and tightened repeatedly) tear or wear out the plastic into which they are fastened.

- Corroded, dirty, or bent metal "fingers" in the RJ-11/12 jacks.

- Too many branch circuits within the house... e.g. it's wired for "a phone in every room". The usused jacks act as unterminated stubs, and cause signal reflections (near-end echo) which can interfere with the incoming signal. My guess is that near-end echo which is inaudible or unobjectionable to the human ear (too low in amplitude, too near in time to the original transmission) can still degrade signal quality in a full-duplex modem transmission.

- Phones on other branch circuits on the line placing their ringer impedance across the line - again a form of near-end echo but with slightly different characteristics.

- Bad connections (e.g. sets of wires merely twisted together, perhaps with wire nuts, rather than being either soldered or cross-connected with a good "punch-down" system of some sort.

- Use of old-style non-twisted-pair "station cable" or (worse yet) flat "satin" cable for the premises wiring. This leads to poor rejection of RFI and hum. Running phone wire right by power wiring can induce hum, and this makes life more difficult for the modem. I can't give any objective estimate as to the amount of trouble any one of these can cause, but I believe that all of them can have some effect. When looking at and diagnosing your existing premises wiring, I'd start by looking at all of the connectors - they're probably the weakest link. Check the wire itself (wherever it's accessible) to look for dubious connections, breaks (rats and mice sometimes chew up the cable), or unneeded branch connections which could be eliminated.

Pulling new wire is probably a measure of last resort but might be necessary. The closer you can get to an "Ethernet-class" phone wiring from your modem's connection point back to the MPOE, the better. A single run of twisted-pair cable (CAT-3 or better), punched down onto good-quality insulation-displacement-type RJ-11 terminations, with no branch circuits and thus nothing else sharing the line, is probably the best approach I can recommend.

Well I guess that before tearing my house wiring apart I'll go to the demarc, (after this monster storm the Northeast is having is over) and see if the line to the CO without the premises wiring in parallel with it gets me a good connection. The best I can hope for is that it doesn't. Then I'll know my fight is with the telephone company. That will be interesting to see what kind of s*it they'll give me at that point as they also provide dialup service, but at 4 times the cost of my provider.. Lenny

I used to have DSL. Our lines were not great before DSL, and were OK after, and I used DSL for at least 5 years, first with Telocity, then DirectTV, and finally Covad. (I think I got that order correct.) All of these DSL services worked quite well until AT&T bought Southwestern Bell. Then my lines went terribly bad, constant crackling and hum, and phone service was even out for days at a time. AT&T's fix was to add over a MILE of zig-zag trunks all over town, and my DSL just about died at

I have internet through Charter Business, pretty expensive, but basically the only game in town. I need the Business service because I have a web store, mail server, primary DNS server, file server, etc. at my house. Once every 18 months or so some imbecile driver goes airborne and shears off the pole down the street and that sometimes causes cable trunk problems, the internet keeps on working, but you get a lot of dropped packets until they get it fixed.

Jon

Oh, yeah. They give you some "phone filters" with the DSL modem. What you should do is install the DSL modem near the place the phone line enters the house. Cut the wire, connect the DSL modem with short wire to the incoming line, and put the filter right there, and connect the rest of the house to the filter. This should greatly help the DSL modem to work.

Of course, this won't do any good for dialup. But, then, I can't even IMAGINE going back to dialup today. With the typical web pages offered today, you might take 2 hours to get the first page load from Google!

Jon

If you can get into the "phone company only" side of the demarc, do so. It should have a surge protector for each line, with three terminals: two for the line and one for ground. Sometimes these go wrong. You can temporarily disconnect the line from the surge protector (on a nice sunny day) and see if that improves things. (It may help to have a couple of sets of 6-32 screw, nut, and washer to make this connection.) Since you have two lines, you could also swap the protectors to see if there is a change. Don't run without the surge protector forever; just long enough to see if there is a change. Also, there is 48 VDC across each line and up to 90 VAC if it rings, so be careful. You can also check for water, flora, and fauna in there. When you are done, carefully put it back together the way it was.

It is also worth applying an eyeball to the pedestal (underground cable) or splice cover (overhead) where your wire joins the cable in the neighborhood, to look for missing/damaged covers, signs of trees or critters or water getting in, etc. These are not really your baby to fix but you can point them out to the lineman.

Matt Roberds

Black or dark brown is copper oxide. My guess(tm) is that you do not have gold contacts and have not applied any silicon grease to the contacts to keep the moisture out. Clean the connectors, apply some grease, and it should last longer.

Incidentally, the new AT&T NID (demarc) boxes are now coming with a different flavor of disconnect. Instead of the RJ11 with a flat cable jumper, it's now integrated with the inside line connector. Swivel the assembly and it automatically disconnects. I'm tempted to put the old box back.

looks like you can't tell anything now with the connections concealed. Progress???????

As Apple and AT&T would usually say "You don't need to know", or more correctly "Now you can't find out". That's why I want to put the old NIU back in it's place. I can't see what's happening or plug in my tester. I'll probably end up building an RJ14 male-to-female T-adapter cable with test points so can do something useful with it.

Made by Corning:

What's the quiet line? Does every phone company have this? Does Verizon?

I have little experience and almost no idea if this relates to you, but I have a story. And it's about DSL, not even dial-up. So for that reason too, maybe it has no application to you. But it's a good story.

I signed up for that 5 years ago, and using some webpage to measure my speed, was never getting nearly as fast as I should Also, I have an indoor wiring problem that comes and goes, and so I had run a wire from the outside interface, up the front of the house and straight to a simple splitter, DSL and telephone.

This meant I could only close the window and storm window maybe 95%. I was using the kind of 4 conductor wire used to connect phones to the wall.

To close the window 100%, I bought special, thin, flat phone wire, from the phone section of Home Depot, meant for places like this, between windows and the window frame. .

A few ways later, my phone continued to work, and the web radio worked, but newsgroups, email, and web did not. I was stumped, and the Verizon DSL guy come over. He said there is mor e than one level of the phone line not working, and of DSL not working.. So the fact that the phone and the web radio worked, didn't mean DSL was fully working. He said the wire going out the window was too thin. (Or maybe it had to do with too thin considering my aluminmum window frames (both surrounding the glass and lining the window opening.

So now, for the last year, I use the kind of 4-conductor phone wire that people put inside walls, stiffer and thicker,, and my download speed has tripled and stayed tripled. .

(I'm still not using the thickest or stiffest wire used for that, but I'm at the speed they promised me, so I suppose going to even thicker wire won't help;)

I used other methods to keep the cold air from coming in the window around the wire.

If you hear buzz, clicks, hummmmm, noise, crackly, etc on the phone, the first step is to determine whether it's a problem at the CO (central office), on the line, or somewhere in the inside wiring. To eliminate the inside wiring, simply plug the tester into the NIU (demarc), thus disconnecting the house wiring. To determine if it's coming from the switch at the CO, dial a quiet line number. All it does is terminate the call to a perfect dummy load, that does NOT go through the switch. If the noise disappears, it's coming from somewhere inside the CO. If it's still there, it's on the line somewhere.

Yes, yes, and I don't know the Verizon number.

That's because DSL is "adaptive". The devices at each end are "smart" and try the maximum speed they can. If that fails, or they get too many errors, they try a lower speed until they can connect.

Analog modems do that too.

I can connect to the web browser interface of my DSL routers (which include "modems") and see the exact speed the line is capable of, the speed it is running at and the error rates. I can even run a BER (bit error rate) test without disturbing the line.

In my case it's not very useful, as the DSL portion of my phone service runs few hundred meters. It goes to a box somewhere near my home which converts the DSL and analog voice to fiber optics.

That device is even smarter than you would expect, it opens its own trouble tickets with the phone company and sends me SMSs when it does or they are resolved.

Geoff.