Sometimes the Most Simple Things ...

An earlier writing deals with our adventures with AT&T and getting a line dropped, DSL moved from that line to our other line, etc. This is about the aftermath.

Before all the changes, we had Caller ID. It’s a nice way to sort the wheat from the chaff, don’t you think? Well, we noticed after all the changes had been made that we no longer had Caller ID. So, I called the business office of AT&T and was told that it’s usual that with so many change orders on one account that sometimes all the services don’t catch up right away. Huh?

Time passed. It’s now a week after my first call and still no Caller ID. I talked to the service folks who said that indeed Caller ID was connected. They had me disconnect phones and check and recheck. Nada. So, they said they would see what could be done from the central office.

Today an AT&T service technician showed up at the door. Good thing I was home. He couldn’t get a Caller ID signal on his equipment. So, he went to the AT&T building down the street where my line showed it was live for the service. Back here and into the basement again, he discovered that the problem was around our alarm system. Heretofore, the alarm had been on one line and the DSL on the other. Somehow, the bandwidth of the Caller ID signal was being filtered out.

He told me it was an alarm problem and not AT&T, and also told me he had never run into this problem before in all his years with the phone company. While he was here, I called the alarm company. In all their years, they also had never heard of such a problem.

The proposed solution was for them to send me one of their DSL filters which I would put onto the alarm box. The AT&T man and I went to the basement to look at the box to see if there was the requisite jack there to do this. We discovered that there was already a DSL filter plugged into the alarm box (even though there never had been DSL on that telephone line before).

Lo and behold, when you take the DSL filter off the alarm box and just have the AT&T DSL filter, all is well. Sometimes too much filtering is not a good thing.

So, when you call, we now know whether to answer the phone.