How to troubleshoot continuously disconnecting broadband DSL link?
The Internet is a wonderful innovation in the sense that it turned the whole world into a small town. People living in distant countries and in an immediate neighborhood are the same for a netizen. Broadband made this transition a smooth experience with its agility. People who had this experience will be greatly aggrieved if forced to sit in front of a computer with a broken DSL connection. As the broadband network connection is largely connected to telephone wires (also channel wires), this type of interruption is likely to occur from time to time. The reasons are many, including rusty cable connections, faulty splitter, modem failure, and phone receiver not working properly.
In this article we will discuss how we can isolate the faulty component to resolve the outage.
telephone cable
As I have already said, the role of the telephone cable is much greater in the realm of the Internet than all other components, so the probability of failure is greater. Just pick up the handset of your phone and listen for a dial tone. If the tone is not clear and you can also hear other noises along with the tone, your phone line is faulty. The DSL connection will hardly last more than five minutes. Since most telephone cables are run underground and many of the lines are far from our home, there is very little we can do about a faulty cable other than call the telephone staff and file a complaint.
dissident
The splitter is the second component to come in line after the phone cord. A splitter divides the signal into two parts, one part containing the ADSL signal and the other containing only voice, so you can make phone calls along with the Internet without being disturbed by the lullaby of the Internet. If your phone line is fine and you suspect your splitter is at fault, simply remove the line connection from the splitter and plug it directly into the modem and start browsing. If the DSL stays there with no problem, you should be suspicious of your splitter or the phone receiver. Just remember that DSL will go down if someone tries to call you on the phone during this time. If you are a person who receives a lot of calls on the landline during the day, you should perform this experiment in the middle of the night. As the splitter is not an expensive component (it only costs around Rs.30), you can replace it without much worry. But before you replace it, please also follow the steps below. You can also check your contacts. If you can see rust on the contacts, remove the rust with a flat screwdriver or other sharp objects. You can also check the phone line contacts for oxidized substances. Once they are all nice and clean, you can test the splitter after removing the dial-out connection.
phone
In some cases, the phone’s own receiver turns out to be the villain. To verify this, you can remove the outgoing phone line from the splitter leaving the incoming phone line and the line to the modem intact. Your telephone receiver will have no dial tone now. Start browsing the Internet and check for any interruptions. If the interruption is gone, it is certain that the interruption is coming from the telephone receiver. To solve this problem, you can buy one more splitter and connect it in series between the first splitter and the telephone receiver.
Modem
If all the above components have been tried and the problem persists, you can borrow your friends’ modem and check the DSL status (you don’t need to change username etc. to check the DSL status). If the new modem works fine, you can take it to your friend’s house to give it one last chance to prove its worth. If it behaves the same at your friend’s house, too, your modem is faulty and needs to be replaced.
Cases where modems fail are very rare and nine out of ten cases our cheapest components are to blame: the phone cord, splitter or phone receiver.
