Hi everyone,

My Spark VDSL has been flaky over the last few weeks. The cause is a noisy, crackly line.

BUT, there's more to it. The line quality degrades over some number of hours, eventually causing the VDSL modem to lose sync. My fix is to pick up the phone. I can hear the noisy crackly line for a couple of seconds and it clears up. After that, VDSL is perfet for a few hours or even a day or two if I'm lucky. I've tried two VDSL routers and three different phones to make sure none of those were actually causing the issue.

Naturally I'll be giving Spark a call to get this sorted. But meanwhile, I'd love to know why/how picking up the phone temporarily fixes a dodgy line. It doesn't just make the line better, it makes it perfect... for a while until it degrades again.