I am about to decorate the entrance "vestibule" of my house and would appreciate some advice regarding the phone wiring. The cable enters the house at the corner of the aluminium front door to a plastic junction box and then continues to the master socket which is located in a front bedroom. A previous owner has seen fit to paint the junction box and the cable, as you can see from the photo at:
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would prefer the cable to run from the corner of the door along the top or bottom of the skirting and around the external corner, so that I can hide it (and the junction box, if that is still needed in the new scheme) from view. If the corner cannot be negotiated, a single, unpainted cable ascending to the bedroom would be acceptable.
I have no need to move the master socket from its current position (it's very close to the ADSL modem).
The second photo shows the arrangement outside the front door, with an interesting before-master-socket extension to the room where the previous owner moved her bedroom when she became too infirm to climb the stairs.
I take that I have to get BT in to do this work as it's on their side of the master socket, but I'm unsure of how to describe to them the work I would like carried out and agree a price. (It's not technically a master socket move.) Has any reader had any similar work carried out by BT, and how did they go about getting it specified, priced, and carried out?
If you feel competent why not just do it yourself? I've moved my master socket to a more agreeable position and had no qualms in doing so. Just don't short the two wires!
Shorting them's not a big problem. Leaving them open circuit for any length of time is. The line is terminated by a resistor in the master socket and the exchange expects to see this resistance or less if there are phones across the line. The exchange tests the line periodically, if it can't see this resistance it may flag the line as out of service and disconnect it on the assumption it's been cut or has blown down etc.
Well we moved an overhead to a portakabin and back to the rebuilt house without ever involving BT..and even used a bit of cat 5 to extend to the new master socket.
BT did eventually see it, when I had a pole fault -- insisted on checking the wiring in the house. Didn't bat an eyelid. Just put in a 'BT' connector to connect the CAT 5!!!
In short, do a decent job and they wont care, if it works. They will charge you to put it right if you f*ck up though :-)
I think you will find that BT Openreach, taking instruction from BT Retail, will just install a new NTE (Master Socket) at a suitable place inside the building and then leave you with the problem of connecting the house wiring. They will charge about =C2=A3120 for this, IIRC. If you ask them, they will fit a filtered faceplate to the NTE so that you can have separate phone and ADSL wiring from the NTE (This is good, it improves broadband significantly for most people).
If you plan to do it yourself then this helps a bit:
They will put the NTE where ever you want it within reason(*1) but the will only surface run any wiring. You can of course already have suitabl= e wiring installed from the line entry point to the NTE position and they'= ll use that(*2).
It's not clear if the OP's "master socket" is a proper Linebox NTE or ju= st a master socket. A proper NTE has user removeable lower half of the fron= t panel. If the OP doesn't have one of these he can go for "Conversion of =
hard-wired master socket to Linebox and Regularisation of illicit master= socket: Per line - normal =A325.00 + VAT".
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(at the end).
Otherwise its: =A399 visit charge plus =A341.70 per line moved plus VAT.=
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I'd just do it but using appropiate cable properly and neatly= fixed. Line shorts wire to wire and wire to ground will be logged at the= exchange, so if you mess up and have to call 'em out they might look at =
the log and think "'ello wots been going on 'ere then?". How ever they can't tell if those log entries are due to you or a BT engineer man down= a hole working on another pair causing trouble. Unless of course there has= been no work on your particular cable route...
This shouldn't be a problem. Telephone wiring is generally easy. It is neither high voltage nor high current as local telephone circuitry is virtually all high impedance (and low frequency for that matter, if radiation concerns you) & you will not get a shock.
If you need to move it unscrew, taking care not to short the wires together or short to anything else conductive, eg pipework & especially anything earthed. Use insulation tape to be absolutely certain but don't leave for long i that state. Get it reconnected into a master box however temporarily suspended. Otherwise your phone may be automatically registered as at fault or off hook.
Bridge any temporary gaps with telephone cable - available in most sheds, maplin, screwfix etc, together with suitable cable clips. There are 2 types of telephone cable viz: the flexible one you normally see with a D shape cross section; and the other round one used for fixed wiring which has 4 or 6 coloured wires loosely enclosed in a sheath (google for colour code & stick with the code). Domestic wiring normally uses the 4 wire version, but you can use either type. In fact the ordinary telephone system only uses two of those conductors. The other two are redundant. The 6 wire version is required for special installations, eg premises with private automatic branch exchanges.
All the info you need is at
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strongly recommended reading if you have any doubts. This firm also sells a look alike BT terminal box which is a proper ADSL splitter.
Main thing to be absolutely clear about is that your incoming telephone cable must be terminated in a 'master' box. The master box contains a very simple 'terminating' circuit, & there should only be
1 on your line. All other junction boxes downwind are secondary boxes which look similar to the master but aren't as they lack this special circuit.
When I did mine I reused the old BT box (which had a standard flat BT socket aka ) & screwed the Clarity box on a nearby wall. I put a BT plug on a short length of flexible telephone cable on one end & connected the other directly into the screwed connectors in the Clarity box.
Result is 2 independant circuits in the house for telephone (one socket in most rooms) and for ADSL (goes to back of house to the wifi). Far better quality. Further beyond the 1st BT box all in- house telephone & ADSL wiring is completely within my control.
Don't use the "D type" flexible flat extension cable. The wires in this cable aren't twisted pair and are stranded, intended for connection into insulation piercing connectors such as a BT plug or extension socket. Such stranded cable can't be used in IDC (punch-down) connectors like those used in the master socket's faceplate. You are better using the solid, three twisted pair type, and use only the blue/white-white/blue pair. Don't cut the others off, twist them back out of the way because you may need a spare in future.
This also applies to your own in-house wiring especially if you intend feeding the ADSL signal over it. For information on the wiring, see sites such as
My underground BT incoming wire is armoured similar to SWA. I discovered it a few inches below the surface, probably originally laid on the soil surface, when trying to get a path edging straight... I also discovered another, unprotected, one crossing the garden, inches below the surface, which I'd sliced through with a spade. A later call to BT told me it was probably a disused cable from a previous building as they hadn't had any fault reports :-)
Last night I asked an Openreach guy about that and he reckons that an open circuit ("dis") line would NOT show up. All their stuff does is to look for battery and earth on the line, partly to check the exchange, and partly to look for a loop/short circuit.
Thanks for all the replies. I believe myself to be competent enough to do the job, but I don't want to get on the wrong side of BT or the law. I think I might go with Dave L's suggestion of installing a suitable cable and having a BT engineer come and connect it up. There's a photo of what I've called the master socket at :
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believe this is a proper NTE linebox, which I'll get changed for one which includes an ADSL filter (or at least the faceplate replaced by a one with a filter). The other thing which I'd like the BT engineer to do is remove the strange extension coming out of the grey Post Office Telecommunications box. We don't use it (nor do we intend to) and the grey cable's quite unsightly now that we've removed the wisteria which become entangled and distorted it.
Now it's just a simple matter of explaining what I want to the BT phone-jockey and getting a price agreed...
Even if you get BT in it may be cheaper for you to fit a ASDL face-plate filter yourself to the master socket. Remove the two screws, pull out old face-plate, plug in new face-plate and replace screws - a 2 minute job.
Suitable face-plates
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's inside (Note: the star rating favours the tests on their own products)
David Browning coughed up some electrons that declared:
Relax. They really don't care unless, by some feat of complete idiocy, you manage to damage their equipment - in which case they might make you pay for it, assuming they even suspected it was you.
I need to re-terminate my line to a master socket and re-fix the bracket for the overhead line as it's on the soffit which needs to be replaced. In neither case do I have any intention of involving BT.
That you can leaglly do your self as it on your side of the demarcation point (which is the socket behind the lower half of the NTE). How ever you may find that your ADSL perfomance is not as good as the "soap on a rope" filter you already have. I found that when I tried and ADSL Nation faceplate v a BT MF50 soap ona roap filter. The daytime performance was better on the faceplate but at night it wasn't as good so the BRAS rate was consistently set lower due to the poor speeds at night.
I can't remeber what you wanted to do now. The faceplate is DIY. Removal of the exterior wire, I'd just do. Lot less agro than trying to explain to BT what you want and get a sensible price.
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