Stop me before I screw up again--filter-splitter confusion

[utilika]

I just made AT&T perform a site visit to diagnose a sync failure on line 2 of our bonded fusion service. Trouble is, it wasn’t a sync failure. It was an incorrect filter-splitter at the jack. Like perhaps many pack-rats, I have collected excess DSL filters and filter-splitters over the years, and I mistakenly used one of the old ones instead of the one that Sonic sent along with the Pace modem. And I just assumed that all such devices are 4-wire, designed for 2 lines, so I did not check for that. Alas, it turns out that several of the old ones are only 2-wire. See the photos.

I plead guilty to negligence for having done that. But if I could do it probably others could, too. Here are a couple of ideas that might help avoid such waste of technician time in the future:

1. If there is a way for Sonic to detect the presence of the modem or any equipment on the customer end, even when the line does not sync, it would be good to make that distinction. Had the Sonic agent told me “Your line appears to terminate with no equipment at all on your end”, that would have made me examine the jack and premises wiring carefully. Instead, he merely said “It isn’t syncing”, and that misled me into thinking that there was continuity to the modem, so I didn’t suspect the filter-splitter.

2. If Sonic could more distinctively label its filter-splitters, as to generation and/or line count, that could help customers with stashes of older ones distinguish the new from the old and keep them apart.

2-wire plug

2-wire.jpg (103.27 KiB) Viewed 3079 times

Old filter-splitters

old-filters.jpg (105.66 KiB) Viewed 3079 times

[mike.perlas]

Sorry to hear about the confusion! First and foremost, I apologize my staff didn't ask to bypass any splitters or filters during your call. It should have been one of the first steps and could have avoided a lot of hassle.

The difference between the single and dual line filters is as follows:

Single has one pair (2 wires)
Dual has two pairs (4 wires)

[utilika]

Yes, bypassing would have required reestablishing the phone call on a mobile device, and in retrospect I wish Sonic had insisted on doing that before sending out AT&T. By the way, the last 2 AT&T technicians were amazingly helpful old-timers.

[pockyken007]

Yes, bypassing would have required reestablishing the phone call on a mobile device, and in retrospect I wish Sonic had insisted on doing that before sending out AT&T. By the way, the last 2 AT&T technicians were amazingly helpful old-timers.

i ran into this issue before as well left old filters in thinking they would work .... took me 45 minutes to realize my mistake