If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. If you have any questions, please see my policies page or if you would like to contact me, you can do so here. You can find out more about me here. I sincerely thank you for visiting!

With our new laptop and wireless router, my wife and I decided it was time to move our DSL modem off of the floor and onto the desk with the router. Unfortunately, our AT&T issue line from the phone jack to the modem was justthisshort of making the mark. So, I bought a 25ft CAT-5 cable. Nope, that doesn’t work because while the cable is CAT-5, the connectors are regular phone connectors.

So, I did a mad search on the internet to find the name of the connectors. The AT&T/SBC websites were useless. I did manage to find that the connectors were typical RJ-11 (phone line) connectors, but I couldn’t find any CAT-5 cables with those connectors. Then I saw a posting in an online forum that made the light go on.

See, when they hooked up our DSL they didn’t rewire the house, did they? The lines are mostly copper from the main trunks to each house, right? So why wouldn’t a regular old phone cord work? We had an extra one from when we had our TiVo hooked up to the phone line, so we plugged it in. And ya know what? The speed is the same with the regular phone line as it was with the CAT-5 cable plugged in.

So, if you need a little extra line from your phone jack filter to the DSL modem, try a regular phone line before purchasing an expensive ethernet cord with phone hookups, I’ll bet you get the same answer.