I'm now having trouble connecting with my SV92P modem again on one of my two lines used for multilink. Today, and yesterday, I ended up with a connection rate of less than 20Kbps. Previously it was around 38-44K, so a huge drop in performance has been attained. I get this problem often, and usually it requires the phone company to come out and temporarily fix it. What happens is there is a large howling noise that gets introduced into the line. It can get so bad that you can't even stand to use the phoneline to talk on.

This has been an ongoing problem for about 15 years now and when you get as desperate as me things can get drastic. I was tempted to load my pump 12 guage and just walk right in to the main Sprint office and demand my phoneline be fixed but I got to thinking. Each time the phone company comes out to fix the line, they never add or remove any equipment so how on earth are they fixing it?

I've spent countless hours of research on the matter, re-ran phonelines in my house all by myself, tried all sorts of line filters, heck, I've done it all. I finally came upon this site the other day and it may be an answer to my prayers.

http://www.sandman.com has information about repairing your own phonelines. Specifically, Loop Current problems that stem from too high or too low a current.

See http://www.sandman.com/loopcur.html for an explanation.

A squeeling sound is exactly what always causes my connection rates to drop into nothingness, sometimes as low as 9.6K which is below the "allowed by law" standard of the phone companies.

The solution?
Either buy the Loop Current Attenuator or the Modem Protector (with or without the built in noise filter)

Greater than 35ma Loop Current symptoms include:

* Burned out Key, PBX and Data equipment
* Cut-offs and squealing on lines
* Crosstalk, echo or hollow sounds
* Off premise equipment problems
* Garbled data and modems that won't connect

These units are supposed to fix these problems by keeping the Loop Current at the proper settings.

I'm going to order the Modem Protector with Noise Filter which is a Loop Current Attenuator coupled with a Noise Filter and see how it works. I may also purchase the passive Loop Current Attenuator since it is manually adjustable.

Agere modems include a loop current detection mechanism so that if the loop current is too high, you'll get a warning and the modem will not go off hook at all....