Phone grounding (make me feel good!)

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glennrichard

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Location
nwest suburbs illinois
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Residential HVAC/Electric
Hi all. About a year ago AT&T pretty much informed me they were going to digital in my area for internet and I had to make the change. Rather than have them jerking around in the house I ran a CAT5 home run from outside at their interface to the room the desktop computer is in and where they would install their new wireless. The tech came out and made his connections at each end. Since that time I have lost internet off and on many times. I've also lost or had horrific static on my other analog phone line from a myriad of problems with their various pedestles. Naturally each time they came out to check it it began working perfectly hours before they showed up yet once they said they did find a problem. Finally, thankfully this eighth internet outage lasted three days and it was out when the guy came.

He said something about an inbalance and checked the large box a couple blocks away and came back again. He found that the system was not grounded and ran a short length of #12 from their interface to the conduit to my A/C disconnect. In talking to him it dawned on me that the original ground inside my house for the phone system went to the cold water line but it was never really grounded because the well connection to the house is plastic pipe! Now naturally the first thing I'm wondering is the same thing any in the trades question, why does it work for a month at a time if that is an issue. It's quite possible that there are spots where the hot or cold water lines touch a conduit or sheet metal that was providing a half a$$ ground. I know residential electric and HVAC but zero about digital phone service.

I guess I'm looking for some hope in that a good (decent) ground is crucial for the proper functioning of digital phone. I can't take the torture of finally getting to someone I can barely understand telling me to reset the same thing I've reset three hundred times.
 
No, nothing to do with any ground and nothing you did or are responsible for. It's all to do with poorly maintained copper plant by your TELCO.

I have no idea what "going digital" means unless you had dialup. You probably had some flavor of DSL and they went to a faster version, ADSL or SDSL. It always was and still is digital. ADSL and SDSL is more prone to distance limitations and other problems with the copper plant that wouldn't bother the old DSL as much. So the only way is to keep complaining about their crappy service but don't hold your breath. Do you have an alternate provider like a cable company that you can switch to?

-Hal
 
What I got was a letter essentially saying I would no longer be getting internet via the regular phone lines/jacks in my house. It was being upgraded from whatever DSL equipment I did have and I or they would need to run CAT5 for internet and VOIP on that line. My other line is still whatever it always was. I was hoping it was the lack of a proper ground since it began functioning perfectly after being out four days once he did ground it.
I seriously began considering comcast but that's a whole other can of worms.
 
I'm 99 & 44/100% sure that grounding has nothing to do with the problems.

An intermittent issue is tough to troubleshoot, but they're responsible for it.

There should be a demarcation point that they must deliver a good signal to.

Have you asked any neighbors with the same service if they're having issues?
 
glennrichard said:
My other line is still whatever it always was. I was hoping it was the lack of a proper ground since it began functioning perfectly after being out four days once he did ground it.
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Coincidence. He might have given you another pair which you wouldn't have known about because that work is done outside on the street. It worked until that one crapped out. Funny thing with outside plant. You can have a pair with a high resistance fault and you take it out of service. After awhile it will test good and if you put it back into service it will work for awhile and develop the fault again. The solution is simple but nobody tags the bad pairs.

Your utilities wouldn't happen to be underground would they?

-Hal
 
Have not asked neighbors. Parts of my phone service near me is underground and they have had problems where the lines come up into the pedestals and run up the poles. I know two problems with my other line were traced back to connection issues at the pedestal. I guess the reason I was hoping the ground would resolve it is because I know a poor ground on furnaces can cause all sorts of intermittent issues with the flame proving circuit.

Larry, yes intermittent is a headache which was why I was so glad it was out this time when they came. I've traced occasional 24V shorts to ground to thermostat wires pinched between ductwork and a steel I beam. Once in a blue moon the duct would heat up enough to expand and short the wire. Another time the short only happened if someone walked in the exact right spot upstairs! Stat wire pinched between floor joist and metal studs in basement!
 
hbiss said:
... more prone to distance limitations and other problems with the copper plant that wouldn't bother the old DSL as much. So the only way is to keep complaining about their crappy service but don't hold your breath. Do you have an alternate provider like a cable company that you can switch to?
Click to expand...

I fought with mine for about a year, all the while paying for the better service. They finally sent a real troubleshooter, not just an installer. Turns out after they made a 'switch' upgrade my house was now 50' further than the maximum distance allowed. Had to switch to cable.
 
Sorry to inject a rant into this, but its amazing to me how, around here, phone companies have totally dropped the ball. Years of neglect, lack of maintenance, lack of upgrades to get into the 21st century for internet capability.....Here its verizon, not sure if they are just letting the system rot away and putting their efforts into their wireless division or what.
 
Feel free to rant. The only thing I have found out over these past few years with the problems on my business land line and the home/internet line is that the FCC works fast! Twice I have filed a complaint and within two days AT&T tried to contact me. They couldn't resolve it but at least they got the message. The freaking hilarious thing is when they left a message the other day the thing was so garbled, on their end, that I could not understand a word she said.
 
I had AT&T internet on the old DSL system with a splitter at my demarcation device on the pole at my property line. I used a wet location CAT 5E cable to the house from the splitter in a conduit along with the 3 pair underground phone wire with the metal gopher shield. When they switched me to AT&T U-verse (ADSL2, bonded pair) the they reused the CAT 5E and I was having a lot of connections issues. Another tech came out and he switched the internet to one of the pairs in the metal jacketed phone cable and the connection problems went away. Note that I still have a POTS phone line on a separate pair.
 
I have POTS for the business line still. AT&T called today again from the notice they got from FCC I guess. This sounded like an actual in the field tech for once. I asked him aside from the safety aspect of grounding what other effect I might have with a bad or erratic ground. He claimed that the the wireless will keep shutting down and trying again if it get's interference or a bad signal. Who knows......
 
1. Noise on the phone line is more often the result of a high resistance insulation fault than a high series resistance. There is a constant DC bias on a working line, and disconnecting the pair for awhile may allow the insulation to partially heal making it appear good again until DC is applied for long enough.
2. When I got a POTS line installed to my apartment at college, the green installer spent a lot of time climbing up and down the pole and talking to the central office techs looking for the pair with tone on it to identify the pair that had been connected at the central office. After a couple of hours he had to call in a supervisor who took one look at the paperwork and realized that the tech at the CO had connected to a pair passing my street address but in a different city. Small error in the work order. :)
3. The ground wire set by the installer and connected to the demarcation block or box is there for use with the protector (surge suppressor) network and in theory has no effect whatsoever on signal quality. One wire of the POTS pair is normally DC grounded at the central office, but it will have an AC signal voltage imposed on it as well as possible polarity reversals for signalling and it is not supposed to be grounded anywhere else.
 
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Pretty much that. A POTS line behaves somewhat like a balanced line once it leaves the CO; any ground past that tends to cause induced hum; sometimes you can tell the distance by the sound of the hum.

And BTW, leaving a line "dry" (without DC) tends to cause more problems as the connections more easily corrode than if there was a small current (sealing or wetting current), but the best way to clean those connections is to ring the line a few times. I've never heard of a disconnected line healing from un-use although I support it could happen.
 
I guess I'm just a bit dissapointed that from the answers it seems like the lack of a good consistent ground was not the cause of my on again off again service all this time. I was hopeful because after 6 or 7 visits it was out four days straight and FINALLY out when the guy showed up. He grounded it and it began working right away. I guess this is why when I replace an erratic or defective circuit board on a furnace I love when it's visibly burnt up!
 
It's strange because the issues were intermittent even though the lack of ground was continuous.
 
Larry the 50's phone system was grounded to a cold water line in the house but from the house to the well is black plastic probably from when the house was built. I'm guessing I had a half a$$ partial ground someplace simply because someplace in the house a water pipe is touching sheet metal ducts or a conduit.
 
What is ironic is that AT&T is pushing the Illinois Commerce Commission for permission to eliminate POTS lines because of the cost of maintaining the copper wiring, yet they use that very same wiring to supply the U-verse versions of phone service. In many small towns like mine, there is no plan to convert to fiber, so the copper will be needed for decades.
 
Again, the only part of a POTS line setup that would be grounded is the protector. Nothing else. If that protector is flaky you might have had problems, but the lack of a ground won't be one of them. Maybe the simple act of moving wires around on that device cleaned up the connections. The phone protector in my parent's house had a "floating ground" for years before I noticed and fixed it; no problems with the service before or after.

Larry- that looks more like a 30s/40s arrester, I have one of those sitting on my mantlepiece :D.

Don- for u-verse connections, the copper pair is intercepted fairly close to the customer (to the electronics), has to be under a couple thousand feet, IIRC. What the telcos really want to abandon is the reaches all the way back to the CO (and the CO infrastructure); it's the miles of 600-2400 pair cables they'd like to forget about.
 
zbang said:
...Don- for u-verse connections, the copper pair is intercepted fairly close to the customer (to the electronics), has to be under a couple thousand feet, IIRC. What the telcos really want to abandon is the reaches all the way back to the CO (and the CO infrastructure); it's the miles of 600-2400 pair cables they'd like to forget about.
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The copper for mine goes back to the central office and is a bit over a mile. They are also using the copper for U-verse in the same areas they previously provided DSL...out to about 15,000 wire feet.

They are only providing internet via the U-verse here, they are not providing any TV services. I expect that makes a difference in how far they can go with the copper.
 
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