I'm in the UK. We have a master phone socket downstairs, and an upstairs extension that taps into the main socket by the use of a splitter plugged into the main socket. The extension plug is an RJ14, but the splitter's socket is an RJ11 (2 pins instead of 4).
On the downstairs socket, we can use a phone, yet on the upstairs one, we can't -- we just get no dialtone. But here's the weird thing -- the ADSL connection works fine when the modem's plugged into the upstairs socket. Any ideas why that might be? I thought the extra two pins on the RJ14 were superfluous when you only have one phone line.
Best regards, Jeremy Morton (Jez)
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The two extra pins are superflous when you have only one phone line; but the catch is _which_ two pins are missing. I can only speak about USA-style phones here, but normally, the first and fourth pins are used for line 2, while pins two and three are used for line 1 on USA installations. The easiest solution might be to get a second RJ14 for the splitter's socket, and make it identical to the downstairs arrangement. PAT]