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DSL Phone filters not working

I have an actiontec gt701 wireless gateway unit for my DSL. It gives me flawless service at nearly 6 Mb.

My problem comes when I want to use the phone on the same line (the DSL and voice are both from Qwest. I live in a very small town, so there are no good alternatives). I have two phone jacks in my house. One is in the living room where the Actiontec is plugged in. The other is in the bedroom.

The Actiontec has a jack to plug my phone into, and then it plugs into the phone jack on the living room wall. It came with a little filter to put between my second phone and the second jack. Here is what happens:

  1. When I leave the 2nd phone jack completely empty, I get perfect
6Mb DSL, but my phone calls (from the living room) have static and dropouts.

  1. When I use the provided filter in the bedroom phone jack, I still get static and dropouts on my voice phone.

  2. By trying literally every possible combination, I found that the only way to get good voice phone quality is to use a 2-to-1 filter. It plugs into the 2nd phone jack, and accepts two input jacks --- one from my 2nd phone, and one from my old MSN DSL modem that I used for
256K service before I upgraded to the 6Mb service.

The problem is that when I do this, my voice phone is perfect, but my DSL speed drops from 6Mb to 3.5 Mb (whether I'm on the phone or not). Note that the MSN modem is not plugged in to any PC or power source.

Can anyone suggest a way to get clear voice phone without cutting my DSL speed almost in half? Thank you.

Reply to
Tony Sinclair
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Are you sure there is a phone jack on the modem? According to Actiontec's web site there isn't. According to the web site there are 4 jacks on the modem; one that goes to the phone jack on the wall, one USB jack, one ethernet jack (this looks similar to a phone jack but has 8 pins instead of 4), and a power jack. It sounds to me like you need a filter on all the phones, not just on the second one.

Reply to
Someone

I'm sure you'll get a quite a few suggestions but here's what I've found easiest:

  1. Disconnect your house wiring from the demarc (terminal box for incoming lines)
  2. Run a dedicated pair from the demarc to your DSL modem/router and don't connect any other analog devices to that line or router (even to the RJ-11 jacks on it).
  3. Bridge a single DSL filter to the line at the demarc and connect your house wiring to the other end of this filter.

You can then attach as many phones or analog devices as you like to your house phonejacks without affecting DSL signals.

Regards,

Michael

Reply to
msg

The GT701-WG (I think that's what it's called; the one with wireless) has a phone jack. Mine's wired backward so the touch-tone pad on my old WE 2500DM doesn't work when it's plugged in.

Reply to
Bert Hyman

Easiest? I'd think that finding a working filter would be a lot easier than rewiring his house :-)

Reply to
Bert Hyman

Yes. It says "phone" on it, and my phone works perfectly plugged into it, as long as I go through the machinations described with the phone jack in the other room.

Reply to
Tony Sinclair

I very much appreciate the suggestion, but as my demarc is located in Spider Central in the crawl space under my house, I would rather exhaust the external filter possibilities first.

Reply to
Tony Sinclair

I'm with Michael, it's not the easiest, but it's the cleanest, and gets the best results. Use a whole-house filter like

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Reply to
William P.N. Smith

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