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The following is taken from a Telephone New Subscriber Pamphlet dated April 1, 1997. It is appropriate to this group who must keep current on service issues related to the Internet.
There is a serious side-effect to having the phone company blow or clean out your lines. If there is a weak spot in the insulation anywhere between the central office and your phone, it can cause an insulation break in your phone line. Through this break, solder ants can enter thus causing an infestation, especially when the insulation break is close to your house. For the uninformed, solder ants, a close cousin to the leaf-cutter ant, crawl through the phone lines and attack the soldered connections in phone equipment, answering machines, telephones, modems, digital satellite receivers (plugged into a phone jack) and home computers, especially those using an internal modem. They eat the solder off of joints causing cold solder joints and opens. Symptoms of a solder ant infestation are the crackling and popping sounds heard on your phone, spurious reboots on your computer and wrong numbers/incomplete calls on your phone. Remember the electrical outage that affected nearly the entire western United States several years ago? It was caused by solder ants.
Three ways to combat this pest are as follows ...
1. Cracks in your phone line insulation, the cause of solder ant infestations, are caused by excess slack in cables between the central office and your home. This slack causes excessive bending of the insulation on your phone lines thus causing cracks thus allowing solder ants to enter. In order to correct this, insist that the phone company pull all the slack out of your lines from the central office end. This is not widely known, but the telcos must do this at no charge to the subscriber requesting it. Lobbying by the telcos prevented them from having to do this automatically.
2. Four to six inches from the device (phone, modem, etc.) tie a tight knot in the phone cord to prevent solder ants from exiting to your equipment (Make sure you loosen the knot when the lines are blown out!). This also has the added benefit of preventing lightning from destroying your equipment. It is a known fact that lightning must travel in a straight line and it cannot make it around the bends of a tight knot tied in your phone cord. This is a little known fact that companies such as APC, who make surge suppression equipment, do not want you to know.
3. Insist that the phone company flush your lines instead of blow them out. Chemicals contained in the flushing solution ward off solder ants and are just as effective in cleaning out your lines. The only problem is that once notified that your lines are to be flushed, you have the
responsibility of unplugging all telecom devices and leaving the phone cord ends extended in to some type of bucket to capture the flushing solution. Otherwise the solution will drain all over your equipment and require professional cleaning. An environmental note: Smaller, less well-financed telcos use cheaper, older, more dangerous flushing solutions. The residue left from line flushing must be dealt with the same way you would deal with any petroleum based solvent. The easiest way to get around this is to insist that your telco use environmentally friendly subscriber line flushing solvents.
Warning: Do not attempt to blow out the lines yourself or try to look into a line that is being blown clean. You could destroy your phone equipment or injure yourself. It is best left to the experts.
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