Does this sound familiar to you?
Your phone service was recently upgraded from old-style analog lines 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 email loads in no time.
Telephone companies are changing their systems to the latest technologies to better serve their customers. Out with the old, in with the new.
But what happened to your credit card terminal? Suddenly it doesn’t work as well as it used to, or maybe it doesn’t work at all. Your business suddenly comes to a standstill.
Ringing a bell yet?
It certainly does for me. I listen to it almost every day. In recent years this has become commonplace. In fact, if I had a quarter for every time I’ve heard of this problem, I could buy a tropical island and build a five-star resort, complete with an 18-hole miniature golf course.
Here is the problem. Credit card terminals are equipped with “analog” telephone 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 might be wondering why this should make any difference. A phone line is a phone line, right? Well, not exactly… let me explain.
Analog modems operate within a frequency band between 300 and 3400 hertz. To work 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 (megahertz), which is significantly faster than its analog lines.
These conflicting frequencies create “echoes” or “line noise” when the terminal tries to dial to process. Since the modem of the terminal does not have the ability to adapt and filter these noises properly, the communication is interrupted and fails. In rare cases, the digital signals can overwhelm the terminal’s modem and cause it to burn out.
So the question is, what can be done to solve this?
There is a device that you can buy at your local electronics store for around $15 – $20. It’s called a DSL filter. This handy little device will filter digital information coming from your phone lines and send it to your terminal at lower frequencies, effectively canceling line noise. 98% of the time, the filter resolves the issue and our merchants can get back to work. Unfortunately, there are cases where it doesn’t work. For those merchants who fall within that 2%, we offer the following solutions:
- Contact your telephone company and request the installation of an analog telephone line. This line will be used only for your credit card terminal
- If you have a fax at your location, plug a phone line splitter into that wall jack, plug your terminal into one side and the fax into 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 an IP/Ethernet connection
- Switch to a web-based or PC-based processing program.
Until next time, thanks for reading.