Funk Babblings

For the past couple of weeks I've been extremely frustrated when working from home because our DSL connection has been incredibly unreliable. It never completely died, but rather it would just go away for a few seconds or a minute, then comeback. Just enough to cause havoc with my various network connections in progress.

Then I realized that it got worse when it was snowy or rainy outside. Hmmm.....

So I investigated the wiring. Outside I noticed that the phone wire running into the house had a taped splice, which could be susceptible to dampness. Also the outside telephone box had lots of spiderwebs inside. Inside was worse though -- that incoming cable was split into its four individual wires by simply hanging by its weight in the middle of the basement, the ends hanging bare with the internal phone wires twisted on. The basement is extremely damp and covered everywhere with spiderwebs, so those bare wires were quite corroded. It looked pretty scary.

Yesterday I bought some new indoor/outdoor phone cable and a small wall-mount telephone junction box. This evening I replaced the cable coming inside, and connected everything together in the new box. I had to detour for a while because the most recent phone jack to be added to the house had been wired without regard to color-coding standards, and since I already had two color coding standards (traditional red/green/yellow/black, and modern blue/blue-white/orange/orange-white) to deal with I didn't want to have a nonstandard scheme on top of that. But rewiring that jack involved some cutting of the kitchen floor.....

Finally I got everything reconnected, and all the phone jacks test out OK. (I still need to fasten the outside cable to the side of the house, but that can wait until tomorrow.) So far the DSL seems to be working better, but it's really too soon to say for sure that I've fixed it.