Connection problems

Eventually I'll get it all figured but for now everything is just another experience. Yesterday we came home after spending a couple hours with the Adlers (our cousins from Baltimore) at 2:30 just in time for me to start working. I logged on and everything was going great until 3 when I lost my connection. I tried rebooting the router but it didn't help. I started calling Bezeq International (our ISP) but right when I got on the phone it started working. I hung up and a couple minutes later it went down again. I did that a couple times until I realized that every time I got on the phone it worked but when I hung up it would stop working again. I called Bezeq Int again and they said that they are having some general problems and I should call back in two hours. I worked on dial-up for a couple hours but it wasn't great and I missed a meeting. I was getting frustrated. I called back again and they said they were still having trouble so I finally gave up and went to my parents who use a different ISP.

I worked from there for a few hours and Shira periodically checked to confirm that it was still down. Now it wasn't even working when we were on the phone. Then I spoke to my sister Amy who also uses Bezeq Int and it was working for her. So I figured something must be up on my end. I called back Bezeq Int and they told me that it must be a problem with my phone line and not with them so I called Bezeq (not connected to Bezeq Int) and described the problem to them. They asked me if I had any phones plugged straight into the wall. Sure enough my parents had lent us a phone today because ours aren't working great and we plugged it right into the wall. Bingo, that was the problem!
That's a picture of a splitter. You plug it into the phone jack as shown above and then you can plug the DSL line into the bottom and the phone into the top. It splits the line. I understood all that and I had been using it but what I didn't realize was that the splitter also works as a filter. You need to put it into every jack and not just the one where the DSL is plugged into or else it ruins the DSL connection. Now I know and now everything is working fine.