OK, slight change of topic. I need advice on something that's probably trivial.
I have DSL internet connection. The phone and modem both plug into the same wall outlet, then there's a splitter. A couple of weeks ago the splitter got destroyed (yes, cat attack) and I bought a new one.
Since then, if I use the phone, my internet connection drops. Luckily, I don't use the landline often so it's a mild annoyance rather than a major problem. Is it likely to be just that I got a faulty splitter, or are there actually different types of splitter around?
Disclamer, I don't have DSL and haven't worked with it as often as with cable and leased lines. But this is a common problem. The usual cause is that one of your phones is wrongly filtered, with a defective filter or no filter at all between the line and the phone.
A little background, a standard telephone is an open circuit when it is on hook, and a low DC resistance when it is off hook. Telco detects this to determine whether your phone needs to talk to the switch. But on a DSL connection, if the high-frequency DSL signal isn't isolated from the telephone, going off hook will shunt it.
That's what the filter on the phone side is for, to present a high impedance to the high-frequency DSL signal at all times, while passing DC and low-frequency through to the phone. Any phone connected to the DSL line without a working filter will drop the DSL connection when it goes off hook. Conveniently, the phone that does this will identify the missing, incorrectly connected, or defective filter.
A splitter is, basically, a pass-through on the DSL side and a filter on the phone side. A defective splitter will fail the same way that a defective filter will.
A good summary in layman's terms of DSL signaling can be found at:
More than you ever wanted to know about DSL filters!