Topic: Stumped! Internet service seriously slow

[Rik]

NP, glad you're sorted. 

[Moreno]

Ok, right have done further investigation.....see what you guys think.

The internet is now working fine, but only if I have no more than 2 phones directly plugged into the telephone sockets. If I plug a further phone into a telephone socket, the red light will come up on the router as we no longer have internet.

Any idea of what can be going on? Is this the router causing the problems and is a little too sensitive? When we had the Talk talk modem in they had 3 phone plugged into their individual telephone sockets....

now I am really confused! Any ideas???

[Simon]

Where are you positioning the microfilters to the phone sockets?  If you use a socket doubler to connect more than one phone to a single socket, plug the microfilter into the telephone socket first, then plug the socket doubler into the phone socket of the microfilter. Then plug your telephones into the socket doubler.

[Moreno]

We are always putting the filter first into the socket then the phone into the filter.

[Simon]

Well, that's my extensive knowledge spent.  Over to Rik. 

[Rik]

It should work, but maybe one of the phones is noisy and the filters aren't particularly good. Is it one phone which causes the problem, or just having three connected? What sort of phones are they, eg DECT, wired? What brand of filters are you using?

[Sandra]

There used to be a maximum of 4 REN that your phones hadnt to exceed in total, not sure if thats still the case or not or if that would affect ADSL. Maybe worth checking what all your phones add up to when its working and if it goes over 4 when you add another that stops it working.

[Moreno]

Sorry Sandra, what is 4 REN?

[Sandra]

REN I think stood for Ringer Equivalent Number and we were told that we hadnt to have a total of more than 4 when adding all the phones together.
It came in when most exchanges changed from pulse to tone dialling.
Some of the early phones had a REN as high as 2.5 so if you used 2 of those phones on the same line you could have problems, most of the later phones had a REN of 1 so you could have up to 4 phones on the same line without any problems.
I think it only mattered for the phones that are actually connected to the line so if you had DECT phones with only one base station connected to the line you could have as many phones as that base station supported.

I have just looked at the base staion of my DECT phone, the label on the underside of it says REN = 1 so it looks like it still may be a requirement but whether that affects the ADSL or just the voice side I am unsure.

[Rik]

It shouldn't affect ADSL, Sandra. It was just about how much ringing current the line could support. In practice, modern phones take a lot less than the old 'bell' ringers, but are still marked as REN 1. In addition, micro-filters contain the circuitry to generate the ring currant, so REN is less of a problem in that respect too. That said, too many devices on the line could be causing a fault, possibly HR, to show which would not normally happen.

[topquark]

You can get an idea how noisy the line is by getting a profile for your modem (assuming your modem is one of the ones supported) by running DMT on it.  This allows you to get a "bandwidth picture" of the range of tones used for your adsl line.

Available here:  http://dmt.mhilfe.de/  make sure you get the correct one for your modem.

[Simon]

That's useful, TQ. 

[Rik]

It might be worth mentioning that the 2-Wire 2700 has the feature built in.

[Simon]

Thanks, Rik.