[vox-tech] [Fwd] suspected telelphone line breaks

[Jeff Newmiller]

Bill Kendrick wrote:
> Tod posted this from an unsubscribed address...
> 
> ----- Forwarded message from vox-tech-bounces at lists.lugod.org -----
> 
> Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2006 08:21:04 -0400
> From: "Tod Tyler" <todt2 at bellsouth.net>
> Subject: suspected telelphone line breaks
> To: <vox-tech at lists.lugod.org>
> 
> Hi, I keep losing my DSL connection AND sometimes when on the phone I
> hear things like another person has picked up an extension (impossible).
> This house is 50 years old. Could I have breaks within the telephone
> wiring of the house?

You could have breaks in the telephone wiring in the house, but a
"break" would be a disconnection, which would mean you wouldn't get
any sound at all.

Telephones work by pushing electrons around through a loop of wire.
The loop is squashed into a pair of wires except for inside your phone
(where it "turns around") and in the central office switching equipment.
The flow of current through the loop corresponds to the sound waves you
hear through the speaker and send through the microphone.  What is more
likely is that the wiring between your house and the central office is
old and electricity is leaking from someone else's loop of wire into yours
in the underground or overhead telephone cable (which has LOTS of
wire pairs.

The problems you are experiencing with the audio quality have been
around to varying degrees ever since the beginning of telephone
service.  A bit of mouse chewing, some embrittlement of the plastic
insulation in a hot location, a careless technician in a splicing
box... lots of things can let current leak to ground or into another
customer's wires.  I find it interesting that the high frequencies
used by DSL can escape your wire loop through "leaks" that audio
frequencies would not be able to escape through... yet the phone
company has gotten to the point where they have so many DSL customers
that they cannot avoid using crappy old wiring that even audio has
problems with for many DSL customers.  For this reason, I now pay the
premium for cable internet... it is much more economical for them to
replace a single aging coaxial cable throughout the neighborhood than for
the phone company to replace all their old individual wire pairs.  The
downside is that I DO share that high bandwidth witn people who
occasionally compete with me.

Your house should have a telephone junction box somewhere near where
the telephone wire comes in (usually on the outside wall, but not
always).  Take a phone and DSL filter out to that junction box
and open it up... there will be a short "telephone wire" plugged
into a jack much like the jack inside your house.  If you temporarily
disconnect the "wire" (which goes to the rest of your house) and
plug the filter into that jack, and plug the phone into the filter,
then you can hear the phone line quality without any potential
interference from bad wiring inside your house. If that sound quality
is as bad as what you were hearing inside the house, then you can
call the phone company and complain (tell them what you did... otherwise
they may tell you the problem is inside your house).  If not, then
either you were listening when an intermittent problem wasn't showing
itself at that moment, or you really do have a probliem inside the house.
Phone wiring in old walls can be very challenging to repair, though...
in some cases the only real solution is to replace it.

The fact that you say it is impossible for someone to have picked up an
extension suggests that you do not share the house with anyone, yet you
hear other voices on the line, leads me to guess is that the problem is
leakage in the telephone company wiring.

-- 
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