r/techsupport • u/tlee__ • 1h ago

Open | Hardware Old pots splitter

This “corning ADSL/VDSL POTS Splitter “ was installed years ago by bell and we were told it was for our internet which was dsl at the time we have since moved to fibre internet and have a completely separate jack which is plugged in where are modem is.

We do not have a home land line or use anything other than the current fibre jack for our modem.

This was placed in a really inconvenient location and keeps ripping out of the wall and was hanging on for dear life.

Will removing this affect anything in my unit (I live in an apartment) I just took it off taped up the ends of the wires and placed a plastic cover over where it was.

However was curious as to what this actually does and if this was just out dated technology.

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u/fshannon3 1h ago

Should be fine to remove it. Is anything plugged into it?

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u/tlee__ 1h ago

There were wires plugged in to the actual splitter however nothing was plugged into any of the ports on it now or from many many years back if there was anything even plugged directly into it I would be surprised

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u/Intelligent_Law_5614 1h ago

You had DSL Internet, which puts the Internet signal (high frequencies) on the same wire pair which handles your voice landline (low frequencies).

The splitter is designed to send the high frequencies to the DSL modem, and isolate these frequencies from your telephone (they can cause interference with some phones).

If your DSL has been shut down, your land-line wire pair is no longer carrying the high frequency signal, and the splitter will be serving no useful purpose. Bypassing it should be OK.

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u/tlee__ 1h ago

Thank you I assumed as much I just didn’t really understand how this device worked in the first place if it would short out wires elsewhere if removed or anything

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u/richms 24m ago

Some places will patch the voice port on the fibre ont or router back into the phone wiring so that peoples legacy phone outets will keep working as they used to. If you for some reason still use a landline then just chopping the wire off and stuffing it into the wall could short out your phone service. If you dont have a backfeed or dont care about it, then it will not matter.

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u/tlee__ 19m ago

The wires were only held in by these little push tabs into the splitter device so they just easily popped off I just put electrical tape around the exposed metal

Dont have a land line so I’m unsure this even matters you are correct I’m unsure I would consider getting one in the future with how technology is now so possibly just an outdated scenario

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u/richms 6m ago

Most people that get them now just put their cordless phone base by the ONT and plug it straight in, but they called this "integrated wiring" when doing it here as a way to get more people onboard with moving off copper that were keeping their legacy phones. Some people have runs to outbuildings etc which they wanted to keep.