Our little home office has two phone lines coming in, one used for the fax and broadband and the other for phones and an alarm.  Broadband is with Vodafone but the phone lines are with Telecom.  We've been running quite happily like this for several years.  We're in Glenfield, on Auckland's North Shore.

Recently decided that we could do away with the old phone fax / broadband line and consolidate things.  Decided to move everything over to Vodafone (i.e. switch the main phone line from Telecom to Vodafone, move the broadband over to the main line and drop the old fax / broadband line).  Also arranged for Sky to be handled by Vodafone so we could get a discount.

I've been dealing with Vodafone to arrange all of this and they've been really great and said it would be all going by today (Friday 15th March).  The plan was that after the broadband had moved over to the main line and we were happy it was working ok then we'd contact Telecom to disconnect the old second line.

This morning our alarm started beeping, which is something it does when it has trouble with the phone line (the alarm isn't monitored, but it is set up to dial our mobiles if it goes off).  The alarm beeping stopped after a while and we wondered if we now had broadband on the main line.  I plugged in the modem and sure enough we had a connection.

Before we did the switch over I recorded my line stats so I could compare them after the switch over.  Now that we've switched I went back and compared the stats and we're nearly half the speed that we were before.  Yes I powered off the modem before plugging it into the new line.

Original stats:
Line rate downstream: 11311 Kbps
Line rate upstream: 1029 Kbps
Attainable line rate downstream: 14008 Kbps
Attainable line rate upstream: 1033 Kbps
Noise margin downstream: 12.7 dB
Noise margin upstream: 12.8 dB
Line attenuation downstream: 21.5 dB
Line attenuation upstream: 11.7 dB
Output power downstream: 19.4 dBm
Output power upstream: 12.4 dBm

New stats:
CurrRate(kbps) downstream: 7840
CurrRate(kbps) upstream: 620
MaxRate(kbps) downstream: 14396
MaxRate(kbps) upstream: 620
NoiseMargin(dB) downstream: 19.4
NoiseMargin(dB) upstream: 12.2
Attenuation(dB) downstream: 12.2
Attenuation(dB) upstream: 22.5
Power(dBm) downstream: 19.1
Power(dBm) upstream: 12.6

The slight difference in the terminology used in the stats above is because my original modem was a Dynalink RTA1025W and Vodafone sent us a new Vodafone Broadband Complete modem.  I did try the new modem on the old line before it was switched over and the figures were very similar (maybe slightly better) than the old modem, so I don't think the slowness is caused by the modem.

After the switch over I went around the house and added filters to all of the phones and the Sky box (didn't need these previously because the second line that we had the broadband on only went to one phone point).  Then I realised that there was no filter on the alarm and I'm wondering if that is causing interference.

My questions:

There are a couple of phone points in the house that currently don't have anything plugged into them.  Do I need to add a filter to these?  I'm guessing not.

I thought the alarm would be ok since most of the time the alarm doesn't use the phone line, in theory it only uses it when it wants to contact us to say that it's been triggered (which is maybe once a year).  However I do know that it's set up to answer a call if two calls are placed in quick succession (I'm not sure why it does this since the alarm isn't monitored by a company, maybe the installer wanted to be able to get remote access).  Do I need to get a filter added to the alarm?

Would I be better off just getting a master splitter?  It might be a bit expensive due to where the phone enters the house and where we want the modem, lots of cable to put down and the house is on a concrete slab so no underneath access.