DSL = Dead Slow Landline?

Before You Ditch DSL Check This…  

RJ45I often hear complaints about the speed of DSL (or lack thereof). But there may be a very simple cure for your DSL woes.

A Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) uses the standard telephone cables running all over town and through your house to carry high bandwidth traffic. It does this by sending the data traffic at a much higher frequency than the voice information. In fact it’s so high your ears can’t hear it- which is why I can surf and talk simultaneously on the same telephone line.

But even though my ears can’t hear these higher frequencies my voice can mux up the DSL information. To prevent this crosstalk (pun intended) the signal has to be split somewhere. This is where the problems start.

In the early days of residential DSL a jolly telephone man would visit your house, open up that grey box on the side your house and install a signal splitter. The splitter separated the higher frequency data from the lower frequency voice signal. From there a new wire would be brought inside and connect to your shiny new modem. Presto– you have high speed Internet!

Alas, the jolly telephone man required health insurance, a living wage and a gas guzzling truck. So someone dreamed up a simple DIY option. These are called filters.

Now when you order DSL a box of filters are shipped to your door and you’re instructed to install one on each telephone in your home. No splitter, no cabling, no jolly telephone man required. Great idea. Only problem is- they don’t work as well. Since the DSL shares one wire you get all the line noise and traffic from all the connections, wiring, extensions and every telephone in your house. One little loose crimp or a frayed wire can sink your bandwidth.

But it’s easy to correct using an Outdoor Splitter.

This is essentially a box that mounts outside next to that grey telephone box. Wire your modem/router from there and you’ll probably see a dramatic increase in speed. Want to test it before you jump feet first? Just temporarily wire your DSL modem direct to that grey box outside then test your bandwidth with a site Speedtest.net.

Check out the Phone Man’s Home Phone Wiring Advice on DSL for all the nitty gritty.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d