The Ring Wire Connection

Hi,

Long post coming up so please bear with me.

I posted here recently regarding a problem I've been having with my ADSL connection since January when my usual sync speed of around 7000kbps had been more or less cut in half. Since then there have been infrequent periods where the line has re-synced at the usual speeds but only for a short duration of around 30 mins to an hour which was puzzling.

Having tried disconnecting all phones and swapping all filters yielded no results but connecting the equipment to the master socket reported the usual speeds again so this pointed towards an internal wiring problem. The only solution I thought of at the time was to attempt to replace the internal wiring but held off with that idea as I was at least still receiving an acceptable sync speed of around 4000kbps and didn't really think more about it.

Recently I've been reading about the ring wire and having it connected on each phone socket may be the cause of interference affecting the line because it acts as an antenna. I didn't really think that my problem could be solved by removing the ring wires and if it could I was too scared to start tampering about with the wiring anyway.

But yesterday another period of a sync of over 7000kbps occured before reverting back to half again and I thought This is so frustrating now so what the heck, I'm going to remove the ring wire on the master socket for a laugh and see if it makes any difference which I doubt.

I removed the ring wire from terminals 3 and 4 of the master socket and then checked my connection. Nothing happened for about 5 mins then all of a sudden I noticed the SNR margin started increasing and eventually ended up a full 1dB higher than before. I thought this was interesting and decided to re-sync and was I shocked as well as elated when I noticed the sync speed displayed as 7232kbps.

I was sceptical before about removing the ring wire could have such a result for me but it has worked so for anyone else who is having sync speed problems give this a try but only if you are at ease with tampering with the wiring and have got filters for the phones in use because they will no longer ring after carrying out this operation, although we have 5 phones and 3 still ring without the filters attached and I'm sure I've read somewhere that modern phones have the ringing parts built into them so carrying out this operation won't have any effect on these (the 2 that don't ring are the oldest of all our phones) if you have modern phones so it's a good idea to think about this aspect as well.

Of course it's still early days yet and the interference or whatever was causing my sync speed problem could return but touch wood that removing the ring wire connection has been a result for me and maybe I'll get an even higher sync speed if I move onto the extension sockets next.

It's now a full day later and I've had 2 re-syncs but on both occasions it negotiated at the same speed of 7232Kbps and the SNR has stayed around 7.3 dB during this time and the error count is similar to what I used to get before this problem began so I'm happy.

Congratulations. I sometimes think we should re-name the ring wire as the miracle wire, it's amazing what it can do, and what disconnecting it can do!

Very shortly, all new NTE sockets will have a bell filter choke fitted as standard on them, stopping the BB signal from going into the bell wire in the first place !

It's not the BB signal going into the bell wire that's the problem, it's the noise picked up by the bell wire and fed back into the A wire via the ring capacitor that's the problem.

If you're interested, there's an even more effective solution. Fit a faceplate filter like the XTE-2005 from ADSL Nation (or if you don't have a removable faceplate, replace the master socket with an XTF filtered socket), and connect your ADSL router directly to the master with a short length of cable. Then run Cat5 ethernet back to your PC's (ethernet is not changed in speed by interference). You will also have the added advantage that you will not need filters on any of your phone sockets, and ring wires don't need to be disconnected.

Edited by deleted (Thu 03-May-07 09:30:30)

In reply to:

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It's not the BB signal going into the bell wire that's the problem, it's the noise picked up by the bell wire and fed back into the A wire via the ring capacitor that's the problem.

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It's a mix of both isn't it? The signal leaking onto the bell wire is unbalancing the pair, making the line itself more prone to noise pickup. A bell wire choke should help a lot regardless, and this is also what you get by fitting a decent filtered faceplace. However I think disconnecting the bell wire entirely is always going to be the most effective solution.

The most effective solution is to keep all unfiltered wiring to a minimum, as I have already suggested. Even a balanced pair can pick up noise, without a bell wire. The presence of the filter in the master socket should adequately remove most signals over ~15kHz.

Edited by deleted (Thu 03-May-07 11:41:13)

I agree on keeping the unfiltered wiring to a minimum - I was referring to not having the bell wire connected on the phone extensions. Not having the bell wire at all is better than filtering it. So the absolute optimum is a combination of shortest unfiltered cabling together with no bell wires in filtered cabling.

Thanks for the link zebedee I was looking into the possibility of fitting a filtered faceplate such as that one and I might try it out in future but for now I think I'll keep things as they are with regaining my old speeds back again.

As cahaddras says "It's a mix of both isn't it? The signal leaking onto the bell wire is unbalancing the pair, making the line itself more prone to noise pickup"