A few days ago my DSL connection kept tripping. After abusing the service provider for a few days, I looked at the stats and noticed signal attenuation was sky high and attainable rate was very low(<1000 Kbps). I checked the wires and found that one of the wires going into the ADSL splitter was hanging on by a few strands and was about to break.
The problem
The main source wire has solid cores, and is joined(twisted together) to a thin stranded wire which has a RJ11 jack to the splitter. I wanted to improve upon this by soldering but later found out that the soldering iron's heat burns off the strands in the thin wire. How do I connect it reliably to the solid cored wire?
I'd prefer if I get to connect the two wires together directly rather than by a jack or something similar(since introducing jacks could cause signal loss).
Edit: My source wire(untwisted) looks similar to this:
The RJ11 cable is something similar to headphone wire – it has 4 non-enameled ultra-thin wires in each colored insulation. It has a red and a green insulation in there(so 4 strands for red, 4 for green). The thin wires also make it a nightmare to strip the insulation off – the wires break too easily.
Here's an actual image of the source cable:
The top and bottom wires are just copper solid-core wires and the printed part is sheath. An electrician came yesterday and 'fixed' the thing. It stopped the tripping problem but I want something more elegant than this.
The other end of the red 'fixer' goes to the splitter. I don't think it'd do much good by opening it up – unless I'd just solder the source wire under the ADSL jack on the splitter's PCB.
Best Answer
Figure 1. An insulation displacement connector (IDC) box.
Wires are pushed down into the terminals using an expensive professional push-down tool with built-in cutter or a cheap plastic pusher. The blades in the IDC connector displace the insulation (by cutting through it) to contact the wires.
Figure 2 and 3. The "pro" tool and the cheap plastic pusher.