> Somewhat off-topic, I was talking to a tech who came to diagnose our DSL 
> line problem once, and asked him why he thought it was a bad idea to have it 
> split into two lines (each heading off to a different part of the office). 
> Being an expert, he explained it to me in layman's terms: it is because the 
> signal goes all the way up one line, then comes back, "gets confused" and 
> doesn't go down the second line. So that's why we're having problems with 
> our DSL service, we just need to disconnect the west line so the signal 
> doesn't get confused
While the details aren't quite right the priciple that splits are bad is 
a sound one.

What will actually happen at a split is that part of the signal will go 
down each side of the split and there will also be a reflection back 
towards the signal source. When the signal reaches the end of the 
unterminated branch it will reflect back and hit the branch point again. 
At this point there will be more splits and reflections.

The result is the signal that reaches the DSL modem will be a mixture of 
the original signal and various reflections of it. DSL is designed to 
tollerate reflections to some degree but still unncessacery branches are 
best avoided.
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