Thanks for the reply. This is a great idea, but a bit beyond me. I'm sort
of a multi-meter kind of guy. The idea is to go to DSL to escape comcast,
who has just raised prices three times in 6 months. I'm in a rented condo
with phone jacks, but I use skype and a cell phone, so never got landline
service. Looks like I'll just have to get the DSL modem and see what
happens.
You'll see about 48V on phone jacks that are hooked up to the CO
if you don't see any voltage on the jacks it's a reasonable bet that
they aren't connected to the CO.
That won't tell you if your connected to a DSLAM though, you can't
measure that with a multimeter.
If you do have DSL on the line you should get the line-sync LED on
the DSL modem lighting up solid, but there will be more info on the
status page of the modems configuration interface..