We subscribe to a Comcast service bundle at home — “Triple Play” is it called? The device that delivers our digital phone and broadband internet service is an Arris Touchstone Telephony Modem , which I attempted to relocate the other night in hopes of attaching our wireless internet router to a Blu-ray player. Why not connect wirelessly you ask? Our player doesn’t have the capability — most don’t unless you want to spend twice as much. All went well with the Blu-ray network connection and internet service continued unaffected for the most part, but I could not get our phones up and running again.
Above: The Device in Question
In theory, you should be able to attach the unit to any telephone jack, and it will deliver a signal to the rest of the phones in your household. Needless to say, it didn’t work on either of two different phone jacks in our basement, so I called Comcast. A friendly rep helped me get to the bottom of the issue, and I learned a couple things that may be helpful to others in the same predicament who stumble on this article, so here goes:
If all the lights on front of the modem are blinking, there is an issue with the phone line. There could be a short somewhere, for example, and the modem goes into self preservation mode. In rare instances, there could be a short in the modem jack — easy enough to test this by simply plugging a phone directly into the “Phone 1/2″ output. If there’s a dial tone, it works. In our case, I’d forgotten that the previous owners had wired the home for two phone lines — I really think this had something to do with it. In the end, I simply relocated our cordless phone base from the kitchen to the modem (no big deal to us).
This modem has a battery, so simply unplugging it isn’t a hard reset like the last one we had (duh, no loss of power). You actually need to find something to poke the recessed reset button on back to return the unit to an operable state.
Internet service was briefly interrupted. Finally determined that I needed to power-down the wireless router before resetting the modem in an effort to resolve the phone problem. While blinking lights generally represent a problem on this modem, the “Link” light is one that actually should be flashing to represent an internet connection. I thought that was a little confusing.
The information presented is top notch. I’ve been doing some research on the topic and this post answered several questions.
Thanks for your feedback — glad you found the information to be helpful.