At 09:51 PM 4/12/99 -0400, Patrick Black wrote:
>My parents just had an additional phone line added to our home.
>When I was using their line I was connecting at 49333 bps.
>
>Now after the phone company (GTE) installed the additional line, the speed
>suddenly drops to 26400 bps (in my eyes very unacceptable).
>Would anyone know why this happened, the line from the house to the telco is
>the same wire, just the other pair are now being used.

Two possibilities:
1) They used quad (red, green, yellow, black) wire, and ran the second line
over yellow & black. Cross-talk between the lines can sometimes cause
problems ('nother reason not to use quad). Did they run any new wiring? You
could probably check to see if it's a crosstalk issue by _temporarily_
disconnecting the non-modem line @ the demarc (where it enters your
premises), thus removing it from your internal wiring. If the speed is the
same, it could be problem (2).

2) When the phone co runs out of voice-pairs (wire from your premises to
the street) they sometimes install gadget to squeeze two lines onto what
used to carry one (just drew a blank, but I believe it's generically known
as a pair-gain amplifer). The end result is lower bandwidth on each line,
but both still remain acceptable for voice and/or fax use (which is all
they & the tarriff guarantee). The gadget is basically a quick fix to the
larger problem of not enough wiring and is installed when it's too
difficult/expensive to run more wire.

Unfortunately, your options are pretty limited. AFAIK, the tariffs the
phone co files specify performance characteristics (quality, acceptable
noise, etc.), but these specs usually end up only guaranteeing an installed
line will run a fax (which is _much_ slower than 26.4k). So, if you tell
the phone co your modem no longer works @ 43k, they probably won't care and
your complaints will fall on deaf ears if you persue it with the PUC in
your state.

>
>I have cat 5 UTP running fromt the  phone box, to my RJ 11 Jack.

Would have no effect, modems designed for use with standard phone lines are
designed to work over voice-grade circuits and can't take advantage of the
higher bandwidth _potential_ of cat5.


Christopher Zguris

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