tcepsa | Victory is MINE!

For the past few months now, my phone has been acting up. Bizarre static on the line, interference from my DSL modem, all sorts of weird stuff. I went to Verizon's page, which did an automatic line test and told me the problem was on my end. So I called up the maintenance people here and asked them to check it out, but they assured me that it was probably the phone company's deal and I should call them and double check. So I called the phone company, and they had me unhook and unplug everything and then ran another line test. When I called them back the static was gone and they told me the line test had passed so any trouble I was having was with my own equipment. And they all lived happily ever after.

Not.

The static didn't stay gone for long. Oh, and not only was it interfering with my phone calls (a very important thing in an LD relationship) it was also causing major issues with my DSL connection, to both my annoyance and that of people trying to chat with me through AIM. So I headed back to Verizon's website and tried to do some more diagnostics. Basically the answer I got back was, "When you notice problems, turn off your modem. Wait about 15 seconds, then turn it back on again. This will resolve many DSL issues related to connection speed problems." Okay, sure, let's give that a try. Turn off modem. Wait 15 seconds. Turn on again. Check connection speed... and it's good! 1792 Kbps downstream, 448 Kbps upstream. Bliss. I resume surfing the web.

About 5 minutes later (okay, I might be exaggerating a little bit there, it might have been closer to 10) I noticed that my connection again seemed to be going sour (any time that I sent 4 or 5 separate messages to someone on AIM without getting a single response back, I tend to wonder...) So I bring up my status page again and get the dreaded "No DSL Connection" message. After a few minutes of patience I check it again. I've reconnected! Okay, let's see what kind of speed's we're getting this ti-- 32 Kbps downstream?! Come ON! Judy's getting better than that on dial-up! So the whole reset-the-modem strategy seemed like it would work, but only if I did it every 5 minutes. Kill all conversations and data transfers I might be doing every 5 minutes?

Yeah, right.

So this morning, my patience once again wore through to the point where I was ready to have another go at it, so I decided to take a look at stuff from my end. One of the things I decided to try was shorting across the two wires that carry the signal in the phone line. That would drop any existing signals that were happening and so that would be a good way for me to figure out which two wires they were. So, listening to a crackling dial tone, I carefully started shorting pairs of wires. When I got to the center two, the dial tone stopped, and I noticed that the DSL modem started flashing like it does when it has lost its connection. I removed the short, and the dial tone came back, with one small yet important difference:

The crackling was gone.

As the DSL modem reconnected, I noticed something else--I couldn't hear it reconnecting. Before, if I tried to talk on the phone, it would disrupt my DSL connection and I could hear a high-pitched whine as the DSL modem tried to reconnect (similar to a regular modem). This time, as the DSL modem reconnected, the dial tone stayed clear.

I am guessing that by shorting it, I somehow allowed built up charge on one of my phones (or the modem itself) to balance out and clear up the static. It's still clear now, as far as I can tell. Hopefully it will stay that way for longer than 10 minutes ;)