I've also seen a couple of cases of other equipment going bad
and interfering with a phone line setup that had worked for
months. In one case, the customer had an answering machine
on the same phone line as his modem, using separate jacks.
He always got solid 44000 bps connections. Then one day he
started to get 19200 at best, with frequent disconnects.
After going down a few dead ends, I had him disconnect everything
from his phone line except the modem, and it started working as
well as ever. It was determined that the answering machine was
suddenly interfering with the phone line in a way it hadn't before.
He went out and bought a new answering machine, and has been
happy ever since.
In another case, the customer had his phone line running from the
jack to his computer, tied up in a bundle with the power cord to
a power strip that ran everything. Once we removed that parallel
run of about six feet by having him separate out the phone wire,
his problems stopped.
Our standard "Please check these things first" checklist for customers
with modem problems now includes asking them to try with everything
else disconnected from the phone line in question, using as short a
cable as possible going directly to the phone jack, and not running
in parallel with any other cables. It doesn't turn out to be the
problem source most of the time, but for the 5% or so of the time that
it =3Dis=3D the problem, it saves a lot of hair pulling.
Michael Bryan
pmu@ursine.com
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