I have a telephony mystery :-)

[Jeremy Morton]

I'm in the UK. We have a master phone socket downstairs, and an upstairs
extension that taps into the main socket by the use of a splitter plugged
into the main socket. The extension plug is an RJ14, but the splitter's
socket is an RJ11 (2 pins instead of 4).

On the downstairs socket, we can use a phone, yet on the upstairs one, we
can't - we just get no dialtone. But here's the weird thing - the ADSL
connection works fine when the modem's plugged into the upstairs socket.
Any ideas why that might be? I thought the extra 2 pins on the RJ14 were
superfluous when you only have 1 phone line.

[GlowingBlueMist]

Post by Jeremy Morton
I'm in the UK. We have a master phone socket downstairs, and an upstairs
extension that taps into the main socket by the use of a splitter plugged
into the main socket. The extension plug is an RJ14, but the splitter's
socket is an RJ11 (2 pins instead of 4).
On the downstairs socket, we can use a phone, yet on the upstairs one, we
can't - we just get no dialtone. But here's the weird thing - the ADSL
connection works fine when the modem's plugged into the upstairs socket.
Any ideas why that might be? I thought the extra 2 pins on the RJ14 were
superfluous when you only have 1 phone line.
--
Best regards,
Jeremy Morton (Jez)

It sounds like the splitter you are using is a DSL style filter/splitter.

With those one side of the splitter is for use by a telephone and the DSL
side of the splitter filters out the audible phone line frequencies but
passes the higher frequency DSL signals. That is why a telephone works on
the phone side and your upstairs phone won't when it's plugged into the
extended DSL side of the splitter.

What you might be able to do is go to the store and purchase a simple phone
line splitter, not a DSL style filter/splitter. Plug that in at the main
plug in place of the DSL splitter you currently have there.

Then take the DSL splitter upstairs and plug it into the line with the DSL
plugged into the "DSL" side of the splitter and the phone into the "phone"
side of the DSL splitter.

Others here may have a better suggestion but that is what the internet is
for. ;)