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Last year I built my house and I have lots of conduit and wiring throughout. Everything works great except for one nagging issue.

My DSL router's connection seems to degrade over time. It gets to the point (after several months) where it can't even keep a connection to the PPP server. At that point if I cut off the phone cable ends and put new ones on it works fine again for another few months.

I have CAT 5 wire running to the phone box on the side of my house. I use two of the CAT 5 wires which run through the whole length of my house to the model. I have a RJ-11 coming off those two wires which plug into my router/modem.

We don't have phone service, just DSL so there are no filters.

Should I rerun the line from the phone box to my modem with higher gauge wire?

Any other ideas?

Bryant
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5 Answers5

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It sounds like water may be getting into your RJ-11 jack somewhere, probably outside where it comes into the house. AFAIK CAT-5/5e/6 all use a specific gauge wire and the TX/RX power levels of equipment is calibrated to that size of wire, the difference is the number of twists per foot. Home Depot/Lowes usually sell some waterproof "grease" for sealing cable splices underground and outside in their wiring section, taking some of that and filling the small cavity of the RJ-11 connector outside would probably help to keep the moisture out. I'd try that before pulling heavier gauge wire that will probably experience the same issue over time.

d34dh0r53
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While doing some more research I came across this article on DSL wiring issues. The key part of the article for my case was the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR):

Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is another figure you can find in your ADSL stats of your home / corporate router (show dsl interface atm(something) for Cisco). This number also expressed in dBs and describes the relation between your speaking strength (signal) and street’s noise strength (noise). The higher this number the better since your voice outperforms the noise.

  • 10dB and below is bad
  • 11db – 20dB is OK
  • 20dB – 28dB is excellent
  • 29dB and above is outstanding

I started to monitor my SNR and saw that when the connection started dropping the SNR was dropping below 8dB right before. I tested hooking the router up directly to the phone line box and found my SNR to be 18.1dB without the line in the house.

While testing the outside connection I did see it drop by 2dB at one point and figured out that it was due to me putting my laptop next to the phone cable. That made me realize how sensitive the line was to noise.

Armed with this information I headed up to my wiring closet and did a few things:

  • Wrapped the wire that was not wrapped in the CAT5 sheath with electrical tape
  • Mounted the router on the wall of the closet instead of having it sitting on a server
  • Made sure all the extra cable going to the router was hung up and away from any power cords

Having done all this the SNR is 18dB (down 0.1dB from outside) which is great. So thanks to MaQleod for stating the wire gauge shouldn't be the issue since that started me on the right track. Thanks for the other answers which also seem to point to noise being the issue, but it wasn't water, fumes, or the termination (good ideas though).

Community
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Bryant
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Since re-terminating fixes the problem temporarily, the problem is most likely termination.

You are probably crimping a 6P2C modular connector (RJ11) rather than a 8P8C modular connector (RJ45) so there is some possibility of using connectors that are designed for different cable.

Stranded wire used in Cat5 patch cables requires different connectors than those for solid wire used in Cat5 cabling installed into conduits.

RedGrittyBrick
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Either get better quality/correct (stranded vs solid, eg) terminations or work some "high voltage grease" (silicone grease in a small tube, available from an auto parts place) into the connection -- probably coat the wire and inside of the connector heavily with it before termination if using crimp-ons.

And check your furnace, water heater, and other "combustion appliances" -- a likely cause of this problem is fumes in the house. (Another likely cause is Chinese drywall.)

Daniel R Hicks
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One thing to also consider is having no bridge taps. This is parallel connections or t's in the wires. Make sure your tip and ring go directly to the modem from the telephone company. You want a direct path to the modem avoiding all other wiring in the house that the dsl signal can get lost on and cause echo cancelling.

user439090
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