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Is it familiar?
Your phone service was recently upgraded from an old-fashioned analog line to new, state-of-the-art digital technology. All your phone calls are now crystal clear. You can connect to the Internet 100 times faster and your e-mail loads in the blink of an eye.
Phone companies are upgrading their systems to the latest technologies to serve their customers better. Out with the old, in with the new.
But, what happened to your credit card terminal? It suddenly doesn’t work as before, or maybe not at all. Your business has come to a sudden halt.
Ringing a bell yet?
It definitely does for me. I listen to it almost every day. It has become a common occurrence in the last few years. In fact, if I had a quarter of every time I had this problem I could buy a tropical island and build a five-star resort with an 18 hole mini-golf course.
Here’s the problem. Credit card terminals are equipped with “analog” phone modems. Those modems are designed to work with the analog lines that have just been replaced with your new digital service. This probably doesn’t mean much to you. You may be wondering why it should matter. A phone line is a phone line, right? Well of course not….let me explain.
Analog modems operate within a band of frequencies between 300 and 3400 Hz. For it to function properly, it requires a phone line that also operates within this frequency range. Your digital line speaks a completely different language. It operates at frequencies between 25khz (kilohertz) and 1.1mhz (MHz), which is much faster than your analog lines.
These conflicting frequencies create “echoes” or “line noise” when the terminal attempts to dial out for the process. Since the terminal’s modem does not have the ability to properly adapt and filter out these noises, communication breaks down and fails. In rare cases, the digital signals can actually overwhelm the terminal’s modem, causing it to burn out.
So the question becomes, what can be done to solve it?
There is a device that you can buy from your local electronics store for about $15 – $20. This is called DSL filter. This handy little gadget will filter out digital information coming from your phone lines and send it to your terminal at lower frequencies, effectively canceling out line noise. 98% of the time the filter fixes the problem and our merchants are able to get back to business. Unfortunately there are cases where it doesn’t work. For those merchants who fall in that 2%, we provide the following solutions:
- Contact your phone company and request to have an analog phone line installed. This line will only be used for your credit card terminal
- If you have a fax at your place, connect a phone line splitter to that wall jack, connecting your terminal to one side and the fax to the other. In most cases we have found that fax machines are connected to dedicated analog phone lines and are not replaced when digital service is installed.
- Upgrade to a terminal that supports IP/Ethernet connection
- Switch to web based or PC based processing programs.
Until next time…thanks for reading.
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