The best thing you can do to prepare for DSL is to find out where your demarc is on the outside of your house/building, then determine where your modem is going to be inside. Then you will want to explore all possible paths between those two points that would be the shortest and easiest to run a wire. Try to route away from any kind of power wires or power using equipment inside. Disregard all the existing telephone wire, because you will want to run a new wire for the DSL line for optimum performance. The DSL installer will put a box called a CPE at the demarc which will act as a splitter to route the POTS line and the DSL line separately. If you have that extra wire, preferably Category 5 wire, the installer will be more likely to install a jack on the computer end for you. If you want to go ahead and install the jack yourself, you can get an RJ11 type jack at your local Radio Shack. If you use CAT 5 wire there will be 8 wires inside the insulation. These wires are color coded as a Blue wire with white dots and a White wire with blue dots for the first pair, which is all that you'll need. The rest of the wires are Orange/white, Green/white, and Brown/white. On regular house wire the colors are Red/Green and Yellow/Black. As I stated before all you need to hook up is the Blue/White pair of wires. On the demarc end of your wire all you need to do is coil up some extra wire so the DSL installer can hook up his/her end. On your end, if you hook up your own jack, you will need to connect the wire with the most BLUE to the RED screw in the jack and the wire with the most WHITE to the GREEN screw. In telephone language, the RED or BLUE wire is called the 'RING' wire and the GREEN or WHITE wire is called the 'TIP' wire. Be sure to mention tip and ring to the installer, he/she will be impressed.(haha) The most important part is to have that dedicated wire for your DSL connection so there will be no doubt that wiring is not a problem. Then you'll know if something goes wrong, it won't be your fault. Good Luck!

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by fuzz edited by DrTCP