Hum and choppy audio only when connecting the entire house

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 03, 2007 Posts: 2

Hi,

I have Comcast cable service into a Motorola SB4100 cable modem. WGR614v4 wireless router connected to the Motorola and them a D-Link VTA-VD Vonage modem. I get a constant hum when the house line is plugged into the Vonage modem and no hum when I plug in a corded phone into the router. I had to run a 25ft phone line to the D-Link since there was no phone jack near my wireless router. The wire is a prety light gauge one. Would this cause the hum? My house is wired with the older 4 wire phone lines too. I hope somebody can help!

Vonage tech support said that I have a good signal and that I should re-wire my house.

Here are the results from my test:

peed test statistics
---------------------
Download speed: 3465728 bps
Upload speed: 722856 bps
Quality of service: 97 %
Download test type: socket
Upload test type: socket
Maximum download pause: 19 ms
Average download pause: 9 ms
Minimum round trip time to server: 29 ms
Average round trip time to server: 227 ms

Voip test statistics
--------------------
Jitter: you --> server: 3.4 ms
Jitter: server --> you: 8.4 ms
Packet loss: you --> server: 0.0 %
Packet loss: server --> you: 0.0 %
Packet discards: 0.0 %
Packets out of order: 0.0 %
Number of supported Voip lines: 12
Estimated MOS score: 3.9

Posts: 36 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Dec 27, 2006 Posts: 36

1.unplug all extensions
2.test a phone at each jack one at a time
3. if hum on all, look at whole house wireing
4. if hum at one check that jack or wireing at that split of wireing

also do you have any:
old bell type ringers
more than 6 extensions pluged in.

Posts: 1179 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1179

Your test results are great and so the problem does not lie in your internet connection. When you say a hum, I think immediately of your house wiring not being disconnected from the telco.

Have you disconnected it from your telco physically? Not simply by cancelling your service. There is hard wiring forum specifically for this purpose. Take a look at the first post which has a sticky icon. It will give you the necessary information to physically disconnect from the telco.

That's the first place I'd look.

Posts: 64 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jun 24, 2006 Posts: 64

Some thoughts….

First, DO disconnect from the Telco at the NIU. If the problem persists....

I would not blame small gauge wire from the TA to the jack, this should work fine.

I had a similar problem in on older (~45 years) house that had seen some DIY additions to the phone wiring. There was this annoying hum/clicking on the line. This was when I had POTS, but the principles will apply to checking your home lines with Voip, too.

It was old-fashioned RGBY phone line. I determined it wasn’t a phone issue by connecting each phone directly to the NIU. The analogous check with Voip is connecting the phone to the TA and you said this fixed the hum, so the issue is clearly with your wiring, not your phone and not from the TA upstream.

I then went to each phone jack in the house, starting furthest from where the phone line came in the house and isolated each by unscrewing the wires from the jack. After about 4 tries, the hum went away. I was able to isolate the problem to a spare bedroom.

Following the wire, I found that it had been run along the floor where the carpet met the wall. One of the tacks holding the carpet down had penetrated the line connecting G to Y. Removing the offending line and replacing with a line run from the attic solved the problem.

Also to consider, if your phone line is run parallel to and close to a power line for a long distance, you can get 60 Hz hum bleeding to the phone line. If someone had an AC device on the BY pair of the phone line (such as a transformer for a princess phone), the same thing can happen.

Good luck.

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 03, 2007 Posts: 2

Thanks!

I did disconnect the incoming phone lines. I'll do the room by room search next.

Posts: 9 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 17, 2005 Posts: 9

I've had the HBB1 for about a month now and it did more than just solve my problem! My Voip quality improved significantly even with all 3 computers simultaneously connected to the internet. It may not have "boosted" my uplink speed by 400% as advertised but it did what I needed it to do. It's cool when callers comment how clear we sound, especially for a free Voip service like Skype. I also noticed that my other internet applications run smoother. Set up was fool proof and literally took no more than 5 min to get it up and running. The bright blue LED confirms that the unit is connected correctly and packet management is working. Although no adjustment is necessary right out of the box, the GUI was a nice option to have as it shows your up/down stream speed, modem and router IP addresses and it gives you access to a few other manual adjustments. An average user wouldn't have to mess with it though.

http://www.pricegrabber.com/rating_getprodrev.php/product_id=9973199/id_type=M

Posts: 1179 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1179

what???