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8. Home wiring
Home security systems with dial-out alert capability are often installed IN-LINE.. in other words, your telco line comes in, goes into your alarm box, comes out and continues to your junction box. The alarm system, whether active, standby or unpowered, is not providing you with a clean connection. Although you can get DSL Sync with this method, the Alarm system can attenuate (reduce) some of the high frequencies required for high speed, leaving you with poor performance or worse. Isolate your alarm system behind microfilters, or on the voice circuit behind a splitter, as you would any other phone in your house. A SWBell user (David Taylor) passed us these two diagrams. Original setup, Modified setup, that solved his persistent speed problems.
If you have a chance to wire your own house and feel comfortable drilling holes, pull two cat5 cables and one RG6 cable to everywhere a computer or T.V. will go. The best cable for a cable modem is Quad shield cable. It's expensive but it's the best. by djwolfe by For CLEC provided DSL (ie, DSL through Covad, or Northpoint), It is the process of taking the line from the drop, where the telco left it, to a socket on your wall. This may involve running new lines at your premise, but this process is no more painful than adding another phone extension. For ADSL, inside wiring is handled by the Telco as part of the whole install deal. Where the Telco and the CLEC must cooperate with wiring, there can sometimes be extensive delays and difficulties, none very technical, usually a lack of coordination.For older apartment buildings, there may be much bigger problems, if there are no spare pairs available for non-Telco DSL, new wires may have to be run in the building, adding to the expense, time delays and trouble.
by You don't. You get a DSL-POTS splitter (www.westell.com is the only place I know that retails one) to place between the Telephone Network Interface Device and your existing telephone wiring. You then run a separate inside wire and jack from the splitter to your DSL modem.Unfortunately, if you have bad wiring in the inside of your house (multiple splices (if you are going to splice, learn the "Western Union Splice"), wiring draping near fluorescent lights, near sources of high amounts of electromagnetic radiation (such as electric wires), or just bad quality of wiring), you will lose some of the strength of the ADSL signal, thus decreasing your overall bandwidth. If you have any of the above things happening, reroute your wire, install new wire without splices (remember, telephone equipment uses very low amounts of voltage, and everytime you splice, there is a chance to lose some of that low voltage), or replace your wiring. Answer #2: There are many factors that can affect DSL performance in your house. First thing to check though is that you have installed the DSL Line filters properly on every phone, fax, modem, or any other telephone device that shares the same line as your DSL A big factor is quality of the wiring. Older wiring was generally a 4 wires (Red, Green, Black and Yellow) in an insulator. This is ok for a single short run but Twisted Pair (UTP) is better. UTP of a rating of Cat-3 or Cat-5 should be used because the wire is twisted to cancel out noise and interference picked up from the air. Also you should use the line cord that comes with your DSL Device to plug directing in to your phone jack. Using telephone extention cords cause alot or problems. Test this by moving your equipment closer to the telephone jack. Secondly, most commonly houses were wires in a manner where all the jacks in the house are in series, running from the phone box outside to the first jack in to the house and then to the next jack and so on. So this adds a lot of splices and places for noise to be introduced onto the telephone line. Try running a dedicated home run back to the main connect point for your house with UTP. You may have to temporarily unhook the wiring to the house to test these. If that clears up your problems, you may have to rewire all your jacks in your house. A Third factor is having too many and/or low quality phones plugged into the same line. Try unplugging all the phones, fax, answering machines, etc in your house that are on the same line. Be sure to check for things that like TV Entertainment units (DirectTV, Sega Dreamcast) or utility meter reading devices that may be connected as well as alarm systems. The are known to cause trouble and are not something that people think about but still could use the same line.
The microfilters that most service providers issue are designed to filter out higher frequencies, thereby blocking the ADSL frequencies and not the voice frequencies. According to the instructor, quite a few of the cordless devices have the same sort of filters built into them to cut down on the interference that they place on the line. Good quality phones actually do a pretty good job. But some of the filters from cheap manufactures may actually have the reverse effect on your ADSL. He demonstrated this by connected a cheap cordless phone directly to the back of a Cisco 677, and it immediately dropped train. After removing the cordless phone it trained right back up. I would highly recommend that you connect your cordless phones in another area of the house to decrease the chance that it may cause problems. In fact, any device that connects to the phone line (alarm systems, satellite dishes, game console systems, faxes and modems) have the potential to cause interference. If you suspect that there may be a problem, remove the device and see if your connection improves.
Spot on!!!!!!!! 2011-02-23 14:06:34 Yes. There are wireless Access Points and Network Interface Cards that allow you to communicate at speeds of 11mbps. Signals run in the 2.4ghz range which will most likely not interfere with your DSL equipment like older 900mhz devices have been known to do. To install you can either screw (or nail) it in place, or you can use the adhesive tabs included with the conduit. The conduit is small enough to hide easily, yet, big enough to run 3 CAT 5 lines through. This is a great alternative for someone living in an apartment, or for somebody who does not want to spend the money for a wireless kit (that will only give you at best 11 meg performance). The speed of your network is up to you and your equipment. For the truly economy minded you can simply staple the CAT 5 cable along the baseboards. Be certain to use non-metalic, round-topped staples so that you do not crimp the CAT 5 or add inducted resistance (using metal staples) to it. You can run a CAT 5 cable up to 100 Meters without problem.
Provided that you have voice service on your ADSL line, you can put a filter at the 66 block (or 110 block, or NID, whichever is your DMARC) instead of one at every station (phone) but you need to route unfiltered signal to the DSL modem. The only issue with this is that you need to pull a clean pair from before the filter to the DSL modem if you do not have a good quality unused internal pair. As an example, at my house I have ADSL Service (really Paradyne MVL, but close enough for our purposes). The pair comes into a NID on the side of my house and from there goes to a 66 block in a closet. I have all my home station wiring pulled to the 66 block, which has a filter inline before it. From the NID, I have one other pair, which of course is unfiltered, all the way to the DSL modem. Conventionally this separation is done via a "splitter" which gives better results but is more expensive and hard to find through conventional means. A splitter is normally installed at the NID and is a 3 port device. It splits the combined POTS+ADSL signal to POTS and DSL outputs. POTS output will be low pass filtered so high frequency DSL signal will not interefere voice and the DSL output will be high pass filtered (so voice signal will not interefe the DSL modem).
![]() Schematic by Andy Houtz Andy Houtz
by Andy Houtz
Upgrading the phone lines inside your house may certainly help. But as you can see above, there are other things that could be at fault. So, before you put out a pile of money to have that work done, try connecting your modem directly to the demarcation point to verify if your inside wiring is to blame. What is the demarcation point? The demarcation point (or demarc for short) is a small box on your phone line that defines the end of Bell's responsibility and the start of your responsibility for repair and maintenance of telephone wiring. The demarc is usually located on the outside of your house, although on some old houses it may be located inside. If you cannot find your demarc at all, contact your telephone company and either have them find it or install one. The maintenance of the demarc is generally the responsibility of the phone company. There are several different styles of demarcs. They come in different shapes, sizes, colors, and the internal connectors can be different, but the function is the same. Usually there will be markings on the outside to identify it as a demarc - the phone company logo, or simply words relating to telephone or the abbreviation NID = network interface device - a fancy name for a demarc. So once you've located the demarc, go ahead and open it. It may just pop open with a small screwdriver or even your bare hands. There also may be a screw that needs to be turned or removed to gain access to the inside of the box. If the demarc is inside, there may not be a box around it at all; you can identify it by looking for a block with some screw terminals with red and green wires connected to it. NOTE: Telephone wiring is low voltage and unless you are standing in water holding both red and green lines when the phone rings, the risk of shock is very low. You should still take every precaution when working with any electrical wires, and if you are not comfortable working with phone lines, please consult either your phone company or a qualified professional. There are two types of demarcs generally in use. The first type is the older one, about the size of a deck of playing cards. This demarc contains only screw terminals inside. If this is the demarc you have, you will need to obtain a baseboard phone jack and a short piece of wire to temporarily connect your modem to. You can get a baseboard jack at Home Depot or Radio Shack. When you open the baseboard jack, you will see some red and green wires. You will also see some red and green wires inside the demarc. Connect red to red, and green to green. Connect a telephone to see if you get a dialtone (don't forget the DSL filter!) Disconnect the red and green wires that go into your home. You will have to reconnect these later when you're done. The second type of demarc is much larger, about the size of a box of crackers. This one is much nicer than the screw terminals because it has standard phone jacks inside to allow you to quickly disconnect your home wiring from the telephone company wiring, and connect a telephone device directly to the demarc. If this is the demarc you have, you will not need to do any wiring. Just disconnect the phone jack, and plug your modem right in there with no DSL filter. Obviously you will not have telephone service once that jack is disconnected, but this won't take long. Once you have your modem connected directly to the demarc, you will need to connect it to your computer. The best way to do this is to either move the computer in the house so it is as close to the demarc as possible. If you have a laptop, you can just take it outside. Or purchase a long ethernet cable and run it through your house temporarily. Do not use a telephone extension cord for this exercise; use as short of a phone cord as possible. You may even want to try a couple of short phone cords in case one of them is faulty. Now, run some speedtests. A good speedtest is to download a large file from your provider's homepage, or Microsoft since those pages tend to deliver top speeds. You can also run some speed tests from this site. If your speed tests improve, then you know your inside wiring is to blame and is in need of replacement or repair. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||