Digital Phone Lines and Credit Card Terminals: Why They Don’t Go Together
Does it sound familiar to you?
Their phone service was recently upgraded from old-style analog lines to new, cutting-edge digital technology. All your phone calls are now crystal clear. You can connect to the Internet 100 times faster and your email loads in the blink of an eye.
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. Suddenly your business comes to a standstill.
Does a bell ring 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 heard of this problem, I could buy a tropical island and build a five-star resort 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 may be wondering why this should make a 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 function properly, it requires a telephone line that also works within this frequency range. Your digital line speaks a completely different language. It operates at frequencies between 25 kHz (kilohertz) and 1.1 MHz (megahertz), which is significantly faster than analog lines.
These conflicting frequencies create “echoes” or “line noise” when the terminal tries to dial for processing. Since the terminal’s modem does not have the ability to adequately adapt and filter these noises, communication is interrupted and fails. In rare cases, digital signals can overload 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 noise on the line. 98% of the time the filter solves the problem and our traders can get back to work. Unfortunately, there are cases where it doesn’t work. For those merchants who fall that 2%, we offer the following solutions:
- Contact your telephone company and request that an analog telephone line be installed. This line will be used only for your credit card terminal
- If you have a fax machine at your location, connect a telephone line splitter to that wall jack, connect 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 an IP / Ethernet connection
- Switch to a web-based or PC-based processing program.
Until next time, thanks for reading.
