Back Out on the Street

Part 3 of Don’t Do It Yourself DSL

The following instructions were written in 2000 when DSL was a relatively new thing! We’re keeping it up for posterity. It’s old information but may be helpful to someone somewhere.

The way DSL works is that there are two signals running at two different frequencies on the same wires coming in from the street. You need to separate the voice from the DSL signal, this explains the need for two pairs. The voice signal just goes to your phones through the voice pair like normal. The DSL signal goes through the DSL pair to a DSL modem, from there it goes to your computer via a 10/100 BaseT Ethernet card (We’ll get to the computer hook up later). You will need to separate the signals before they come into your house, other wise you will get DSL noise on your telephones. To separate the signals you need what they call a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Signal) Splitter. PacBell’s kit comes with Siecor Brand Splitter, model name: ADSL POTS Splitter – Outdoor Ancillary Device, Part Number SPS-H70-SR1. The POTS Splitter enables you to split the signals into two pairs. In my case, it would have been difficult to mount the splitter on the stucco wall just outside the telephone box as they do normally, so mounted the splitter inside my garage to the outside of a plywood enclosure that surrounds my main electrical breaker box and telephone box. Next I disconnected the all the pairs going to the house and made a jumper cable going from the protector to the POTS Splitter.

Split ’em Up!

I made the jumper (about 3 feet in length) from the UTP cable that PacBell sent with my kit. Once again I chose the Blue pair for the jumper. Sorry if this is getting redundant, I just want to make everything clear. So starting from the top: the Yellow (Ring) and Black (Tip) from the street are connected to the Blue w/White (Ring) and White w/Blue (Tip) of the jumper. The other end of the jumper is connected to the NETWORK terminals of the POTS Splitter. There are 3 terminal pairs on the POTS Splitter: NETWORK, VOICE and DATA each having a Ring and Tip terminal.

The Network terminals are connected to the lines from the street (in my case a jumper from those lines) then the pairs for voice and DSL that venture off into the house are connected to the Voice and Data terminals respectively. In my case the Blue pair is connected to the voice terminals and Green pair is connected to the Data terminals.

Of the two cables coming into the box, the tannish brown jacketed cable is the house cables. The gray cable is the jumper. And that’s it! It’s just that simple.