In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 31 Jul 2015 02:11:33 -0400, J Burns
wrote:

On 7/30/15 10:23 AM, micky wrote:
In alt.home.repair, on 30 Jul 2015 13:55:15 GMT, notbob
wrote:

On 2015-07-30, micky wrote:

But one modular jack has black spring wire,
and modular plug has one black contact.

Need gold connections.

Been there, wore out that t-shirt.

Got an outside line (POTS/DSL) from my point-of-access (PA) to house.
Couldn't find a single line long enough so connected two lines with
dbl-female union. Over the last Spring, lost both phone and internet
connectivity several times.

Yesterday for the first time, there was scratchiness on the phone,
though that had gone away before I fiddled with this jack.


If your NID has a disconnect jack, you could plug in a phone there to
see if there's any problem outside your own wiring.

This is the first time I can recall scratchiness in the phone, so I'm
not going to worry about it.

My phone wiring is so old that there's not even a disconnect plug at the
service entrance. I think it's two insulated wires twisted around each

You probably know that in most places, the phone company will put a NID
in for free.

other. I could use a browser to get a GIU interface with my DSL modem.
It kept a record of what it measured when I dialed up. That showed me
that my old wiring handled the frequencies very well.

No kidding? How would I do that?

There were intermittent problems on voice and DSL. I disconnected my
home wiring at the NID, clipped a jumper across the ends, and used a
meter to find any resistance in the system. There was a little
resistance where a spade terminal of the wall jack screwed down. I
cleaned that up.

Intermittent scratchiness continued for years. One morning it was
especially bad. When I phoned to report it, they said they'd have it
fixed in 24 hours. When I phoned from a neighbor's an hour later to say
I'd lost service completely, they said a week.

That was the Marine slogan. "Scratcihness we do immediately. No
service we take a week."

I ordered cable. When the phone man showed up, he found that the phone
cable along the street was broken in two places. I'll bet they'd been
broken for years. By now, my neighbor had been without phone service
four days. The phone man told her he could have fixed it in five minutes
because he knew where her break was and his ladder was up, but that
would have been against company policy. She had to wait a few more days.

Cable gives me five times the speed for less than half the price of DSL.

Glad to hear that.

It turns out instead of looking for gold-plated phone modular
connectors, there are screws inside the NID that I plan to use. That
will get rid of their modular connection and my own. and it won't get
moldy or whatever because it can be tightened down, compared to my wire
that blew in the wind. I don't know if slight moviement of the plug in
the jack would clean the connection or allow it to get dirty.