Does the length of the phone cable (wall to modem) make a difference in internet speed?noYES!no, but the quality of the cable may affect your speed(but not enough to make a noticeable difference).If it makes a difference that is noticible, it is a significant difference.

And this has been the real experience of many people.
In PBX installations, say a a Motel,  the cable can not be more than about 3,000 feet. And even then it it may not work  RIGHT in some conditions. If the cable is placed near things that radiate strong EMF fields.

In some private homes an extension cable of 25 feet may make the dial-up connection unreliable. Nobody knows why and/or does not want to bother finding know why. Just get the modem closer to the phone jack. Anyway, research on Dial-Up is a dead end.

Bur with  DSL, you have to use the filters. Preferably the unfiltered wire should be as short as you can get it. But I have run unfiltered wire  over a hundred feet to the modem. Worked good. Until the modem failed. Cheap modem.

Yeah, it should not make a difference. But sometimes it does.
and any internet connection you have, even T1, T3, and the other high speed ones...are always susceptible to EMF slowing them down.Yes, it sure makes a difference!
To measure this, disconnect the cable, and measure the Ohmage with a Digital Multimeter, and Thou shall see the difference.

An other simple sample is a Speaker wire. The shorter the wire the better. The thicker the wire the better. Again, use a Multimeter to measure the effect.

And if one still does not believe it, run your vacuum cleaner or electric drill on a extension cord designed for a table lamp and you will burn out the motor.
 

it won't affect the signal speed. However- there will be a percieved difference since some of the packets will have errors due to the line length and accumulated quality problems. The speed of the signal REMAINS the same... but more packets need to be resent, so the speed of the connection as a whole slows down.

the difference between telephone wire as used for Internet connectivity and speaker wire and several other applications is that it is merely digitized packets- as such the INTERNAL rounding of the analog waveforms back into digital recognizable form has more room for quality problems that a analol reciever would pickup and result in a noticable sound distortion.

as an example, let's assume that the top and bottom of the sendable signal are the numbers 0 and 1000 (of course, they are in Khz ranges for actual telephone transmitters, but this is for the sake of comparison).

Digitizing data will send 0 for a 0 bit, and a 1000 for a 1 bit after being modulated. problems with the signal quality can cause this signal to degrade and change on it's way to the destination, but as long as the value is on the same side of 500 (halfway) it is likely to be Demodulated back into the correct bit value.

Of course, the quality of the Modulator and Demodulator circuits, as well as Compression implemented by many modems can easily mean more errors or fewer errors.


Basically Digital signals are affected less by signal degradation then analog signals- so an analogy between Digitized internet signals and speaker wire with analog sound signals isn't 100% accurate.The use of Analog or Digital is not the main issue. With good tradition analog practice, a voice quality telephone circuit using traditional standards can go almost 50 miles without the need for a repeaters. (You had to SHOUT.) But and it is a big but, nowadays that is never done. In fact, the phone company hopes you are less that ten miles from the office. For DSL they want you inside a mile. In practice, the analog telephone signal goes further. The digital signal does not go as far.

Dial up is really a form  of analog communication of digital signals. It is not pure digital. It travels over voice quality connections, and can fall back to 1200 baud if the connection is very bad. About 33k is typical. But 48K is very good. And the 56k is only possible on direct dedicated wires.

DSL is well above 256 K in most cases.

Exactly how the DSL system works is more complicated that what you want to know. It is a hybrid technology using both digital and analog methods. The voltmeter check is of very LITTLE value for DSL. There are other kinds of equipment they have to use. I have talked to some of the support people when I had some DLS problems and I was amazed that only the field technicians had access to the stuff that really tells what went wrong.. A tech came out here to my home and measured the signal quality and compared it to his records. Thye use a spectrograph to map out you connection. Each connection is different because of propagation issues. You have to realize that if the cable has  a length of hundresds of feet and has open bridges, the is a lot of echo.
Quote from: Geek-9pm on February 17, 2009, 09:30:41 PM

The use of Analog or Digital is not the main issue. With good tradition analog practice, a voice quality telephone circuit using traditional standards can go almost 50 miles without the need for a repeaters. (You had to SHOUT.) But and it is a big but, nowadays that is never done. In fact, the phone company hopes you are less that ten miles from the office. For DSL they want you inside a mile. In practice, the analog telephone signal goes further. The digital signal does not go as far.

Dial up is really a form  of analog communication of digital signals. It is not pure digital. It travels over voice quality connections, and can fall back to 1200 baud if the connection is very bad. About 33k is typical. But 48K is very good. And the 56k is only possible on direct dedicated wires.

DSL is well above 256 K in most cases.

Exactly how the DSL system works is more complicated that what you want to know. It is a hybrid technology using both digital and analog methods. The voltmeter check is of very little value for DSL. There are other kinds of equipment they have to use. I have talked to some of the support people when I had some DLS problems and I was amazed that only the field technicians had access to the stuff that really tells what went wrong.. A tech came out here to my home and measured the signal quality and compared it to his records. Thye use a spectrograph to map out you connection. Each connection is different because of propagation issues. You have to realize that if the cable has  a length of hundresds of feet and has open bridges, the is a lot of echo.