Crackling Phone & ADSL2+ speed and dropouts?

Posted at 16/09/2016 04:59pm

After picking up your telephone handset and hearing a slight humming or a crackly noise on the line, chances are you’ve got a loose connection located on your line. Attempting to locate the crackle would be your next step to try understand whether the fault is generated within your home wirings internal network. i.e. bedroom, study or kitchen wall sockets, or in-fact generated from an outside source, i.e. Internet Service Provider.

The humming noise may however be slightly more difficult to fix, as generally cause from an earth leakage from one leg of the 2-pair phone line. Sorry, you might need a telephone technician to iron out that one for you.

You can see our technician Mark in Sydney checking the customer’s incoming telephone line at the network boundary point for line crackling. Fortunately for the customer, we were able to fix the issue, as these old type connections needed re-soldering.

our telephone technician who services sydney region checking phone lines from MDF

Can a crackly noise on a telephone line affect ADSL or VDSL speeds?

Indeed. A crackling noise on your line basically means you’ve got a really poor connection on one of the joints of the telco’s network, or a poor connection within your wall sockets. These are mostly produced by old poorly terminated connections or corrosion. If you have these old yellow sockets powering your ADSL or VDSL NBN connection, you may wish to upgrade them. They’re around 20+ years old, and not designed for high speed internet connections.

old style yellow 610 phone socket

I bet my bottom dollar your crackling noise has some impact on the transmission quality in speed of your ADSL internet connection, to what extent however, will be undetermined unless you engage a ACMA licensed telephone engineer to investigate.

poor adsl speeds Image: Poor ADSL 2+ speed test results from crackling telephone line

Every time you hear the crackle your modem is constantly adjusting its error correction parameters to deliver you stable internet connection, this usually means your modem will make a decision to reduce the maximum available speed to you, in order to prevent errors being sent through your modem and out to the internet.

What causes crackling on home telephone line?

Aged termination points and wall sockets are the more likely cause to crackling phone lines, also leading in poor and variable internet experiences. Generally, you’ll need to engage an ACMA approved technician to pinpoint the fault location and provide a fix.

Honestly, it wouldn’t hurt at all if you’re living in an older style house or unit, to take some actionable preventative maintenance and have a technician come over and re-terminate your wall sockets anyway, and whilst there have them perform speed + signaling diagnostics on your line. No point paying those costly monthly fees for a high speed ADSL or VDSL connection when you’re not achieving the speed promised from your ISP.

How to fix crackling or humming on your telephone line?

Honestly, you can certainly attempt to replace the flyleads between modem and handsets back to your phone points, however you might want to consider the services from the experts. Yep! Mr Telco.

Mr Telco will charge you $189 for preventive maintenance and make sure your cabling is in tip-top shape + we also provide onsite service fault reports + instant speed test reports, complementary on the job, delivered instantly via e-mail/pdf.

Click Here - Book our licensed phone and internet technicians