AT&T Southwest → What is pair gain? Help asi tech.

What is pair gain? swbell says that is the problem with my line and thats why i cant get dsl in my neighborhod. how can i get that removed or fixed?

thanks

said by anfmanusa:

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What is pair gain? swbell says that is the problem with my line and thats why i cant get dsl in my neighborhod. how can i get that removed or fixed?

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In the past that is the worst news someone could hear when looking for DSL service. Basically your are sharing copper with your neighbors for phone service. DSL needs dedicated lines.

There is a ray of hope in Project Pronto. There has been talk of some of the PP units being compatible for Pair Gain. I haven't heard much on this front lately, hopefully this post will start up some discussion on that again.

Unfortunately for now that means NO DSL.

is there anyway to fix it? why do they share the line like that? any way i could get a dedicated line? what if i bought a second line?

Pair Gain is a type of equipment that SWBT uses in areas where the copper facilities are low or used up. This equipment takes 4 pairs and puts 96 phone lines on them, by installing g multiplexors at both ends. The drawback to this is that frequencies needed by DSL and 56k modems won't pass thru. If the pair gain is fed by fiber then they can be replaced by Litespan units and upgraded to Digital Pair Gain that is DSL capable but it's expensive and takes a long time.

Usually when you are in a pair gain system, your whole neighborhood is pair gain. It was a way of saving wiring money when the neighborhood was constructed. So I *think* that any second line would also be pair gain. I might be wrong on this, but I have never heard of anyone getting out of this jail before.

Flippant's right. While there might be some occasional rare instances where there are copper pairs, SWBT tends to reserve those for Special Circuits(T1, ISDN and such). Sorry for the news but that's pretty much what it's going to be until they put Pronto in your area.

Ken

There are many areas where the SAI is fed by copper and "pair gain" (slc, slic96, RT, etc...). I've seen many with a healthy mix of about 50/50. What you can do is try to get a hold of the engineer for your area (exchange) and find out if you are eligible for line conditioning. Before DSL, people would do this all of the time for 56k modems. What happens is PG will only transmit 24.4 to 28.8 max. So people would pay to have their line conditioned for 56k traffic. They would be cut over to a clean and balanced copper pair. Viola !!! 40-50kb/s.
Keep in mind that this is a one time fee service. It is not free. The phone co. only guarantees you voice grade service on voice grade lines. If you can get re-provisioned to copper it will greatly improve your chances of getting DSL.

I also had pair gain on my line, however, after my Pronto RT was activated, and even though I had pair gain, I was able to get DSL. So there is hope for you! Once Pronto is complete in your area you should be able to get DSL.

However, the type of pair gain they used in my area was not actually pair gain. It was some other type of "gain" because I talked with a SWBell tech that was repairing my line one day and he said that this type of "gain" (I can't remember what he called it) only did only one conversion and this is why the speeds on dial-up were still high with the "gain" (I used to connect at 49-50kbps).

Quick note on pair gain. For any CO based DSL order, pair gain is a bad thing and unless a spare pair can be found to cut you over to, you will end up being denied service. For RT based DSL service, you require pair gain to work. The RT's are connected back to the CO with fiber optic cables (hence your pair gain) but this time it's on the other side of the splitter!! This is why the only hope for pair gain customers is a pronto RT.