Telephone wiring ?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. My question is how do physically layout the wiring? Do you draw a single loop around the house, pulling a tap off for each room that has a drop? Or, do you have a single line to a central box and than pull a dedicated line from the box to each room that has a drop?

A. The best approach, if you use the modem at only one location, is to wire the cable ONLY to that location. To provide future flexibility you can run additional wires other places, but only leave one wired to the demarcation box at a time. If you do move around quite a bit, either star or daisy-chain configuration works, though star is recommended in case you ever want to use the same cable for Ethernet in the future. The recommended way is to "home run" each cable back to a central location and, optionally, to put in a patch panel to allow you to hook up only the cables that are to be used -- this reduces the "antenna" effect and minimizes induced noise on the line. As for your connect speed, you may well have other problems. Right now I'm getting 45.2k and the modem is still plugged into the old phone wiring in my house -- it would be hard to imagine any worse installation than I found here with phone wires spliced and snaking all over the place. And I live in a high-interference area with a low frequence AM radio station nearby. It would be educational and useful to take your system outside to the service demarcation box and plug your computer in there. This will tell you the absolute maximum you could ever receive from your ISP since signals can only degrade after they leave this box. Keep in mind that your phone wire runs from your jack, through your home, and then possibly several miles to the telephone company central office. If the wiring in your home is in really bad shape, then maybe replacing it will help with a better connection. But you can't replace the wiring from your home to the central office and that is probably where the problem is. Now sometimes the phone company can find better quality wires within an existing cable and sometimes not. Some local phone companies offer a "data quality" dial-up line. This costs more money though. I think what they do is to pick out the best line between your home and the central office and they may place special "line conditioning" stuff on the line to "clean it up". Having this done and replacing the wiring in your home may or may not speed things up. Also there is the distance from your home to the central office (longer causes more noise) and there is not much you can do about that outside of moving closer to the central office. Ask your real estate agent for a home with a nice view of the telephone company central office if need be!

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