Outside DSL Splitter Install

The following will describe how to split your telephone line so that you can filter your entire home with one filter and provide a dedicated unfiltered cable to your modem.

Step 1: Find your telephone network box which should be on the exterior of your home. It's the gray box where your telephone service is connected. There are two sides: The right hand side is reserved for SWB access, and the left hand side is the customer access side. You'll need a flat blade screw driver to open your side (left side).

Open the box and you should see something like my open box:

In my case, I have three circuits installed, including an ISDN line which is uncommon. Your telephone network box may have one or two circuits (or more) like Line 1 and Line 2 above. For each telephone line, there is a jack on the right side that has a plug inserted. The plug and corresponding telephone wire loops around and connects underneath to colored terminals. Each jack is capable of carrying two lines, the first being the red/green terminals, and the second being the yellow/black terminals. In my case each jack has only one line and it's the red/green terminals. The yellow/black terminals are dead and no wires are connected to them. This is common.

Step 2: Find out which circuit carries the DSL signal. This is fairly easy. Since you know the telephone number which is carrying the DSL service, just unplug one jack at at time until the line number with DSL has gone dead in your home. In the example above, my DSL line is Line 2, shown above. Yours may be Line 1, etc.

.Identify the wires which are connected to the red and green terminals of your DSL circuit. These are the wires that carry your phone service into your home. Note and label which wire(s) connect to the red terminal and which wire(s) connect to the green terminal.

Step 3: Prepare a single filter to apply to the interior home wiring. Take a filter, and prepare it like the following image:

This involves cutting the ends of the wires and removing the insulation as shown above. It helps to use a spare telephone line on one end to provide for a few inches of extra wire. You can plug one end of a spare telephone line into the jack on the filter and trim the other end. After exposing the copper wires, twist the ends. If you're comfortable with a soldering iron, you might want to tin the twisted leads that you've exposed. If your telephone service is like mine, with only the red/green terminals being active, you can trim the yellow and black wires back - they won't be used.

Step 4: Create a dedicated circuit to run from your telephone box to the room with your DSL modem. The red/green polarity must be maintained. This is a step that's completely up to you to design, and there's no unique way to achieve it. If you've identified an unused interior telephone line circuit you wish to dedicate to unfiltered DSL, you won't need to run any cable. For previous COVAD clients, there will be a circuit that is now unused, and you can use the wiring of that circuit. In my case, I drilled a hole from the exterior of my house into my study and ran cat 5 cable from the telephone box to the inside of my study. This step is probably the most work.

Step 5: Unplug the jack to protect the SWB DSL circuit while you disconnect and connect new lines. If you accidentally short out your DSL phone line while connected to SWB, your DSL service will be disabled for about 12 hours, or until the circuit resets itself.

Step 6: Physically split the DSL line into a filtered side that goes to your inside telephone circuit and an unfiltered side that connects to your modem.

Disconnect the small wires of the DSL line that carry your interior phone service (label them before doing this) from the red and green terminals, and twist them together respectively to the red and green trimmed wires you prepared on the "phone" side of the filter. Protect the twisted connections with electrical tape. Now connect the "line" side of the filter to the red and green terminals using the red and green trimmed wires respectively.

Step 7: Plug the jack back into the plug, close the box, and you're done!