Noisy line and poor broadband? Read this

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I had about 5 years of similar experience trying to get my copper telephone line upto scratch for broad band.

I wont elaborate here all the frustrations I had in getting it sorted out. Even an overview is lengthy! What really frustrated me was that the problem would have been very simple for me with some practical knowledge of electricty and electronics to fault find for myself if only I could get access to the copper telephone line.

When our telephone was first installed on a new exchange connection in the 1980s we had to make several complaints about variable noise on the line. An engineer would turn out and things would get a bit better for a bit. However it was always there and we just had to ask people to speak up to overcome the noise when it was present.

Now forward to the late 90's I got dial up -- never as good as other people's and sometimes would lose the connection. Then around 2003 I got 500kb/s broadband from BT, and would this would lose connection in a random way with bad spells on some days. I could monitor varying signal/noise reports from my router but could not get BT broadband to solve it. At one point they downgraded my then nominal 2Mb/s connection to 1 Mb/s but that did not improve anything - just made downloads slower!

By 2008 I knew I had a completely clean system in my house -- a splitter in the BT incoming wall socket. Same results from several ADSL routers. After a particularly bad spell I tried another phone line problem report "Intermittent crackles - too bad to hear the caller". We went through the usual business of the phone line being checked OK from the exchange, but then when the engineer came around and heard the crackles and also had problems connecting his PC over the broadband, they finally agreed to check the whole line from the exchange about 2 km away.

They determined it was OK to the cabinet at the end of the road, and then proceeded to lift all the manholes down the road and remade the connections. At the one near my house serving the final 30 houses they discovered a dry joint in my line and when it was reamade (cut out the old crimped connection - strip the wires and recrimp) the noise just disappeared on my phone - I had never heard it so quiet. The engineer proceeded to re-crimp all the other 60 wires to the other houses - he took nearly an hour at that manhole. He muttered about the poor connection techniques used in the 80s, and loaded up the cable junction box with dessicant and used plenty of silcone sealant.

I have not looked back since - solid connection for weeks at a time. The line attentuaion figues and noise now suggest I should get over 8Mb/s although I am still on 1 Mb/s which does not really matter since big downloads now reliably complete.

Moral: if you can hear any noise on the phone line - report it as variable and interrupting telephone calls at times, and get the phone engineer to listen to it. Then plead he checks all the connections in the line upto the exchange.