Broadband query

[Roger Chapman]

I upgraded to BT Infinity some time ago. When the openreach engineer turned up to do the necessary my house was a building site and I had my computer installed temporarily in the kitchen where the master socket is. The blurb had said that I would need a long connection cable from the home hub to the computer if not installed close to the master socket and that would be provided, albeit as a surface mounted connection. However the engineer said that would not be necessary as he would install a second master socket in the room I had designated as my office replacing an extension socket originally installed by BT for Micronet use back in the 1980s. (I gave up on Micronet when Offcom demanded that BT charge extra for this service and did not rejoin the modern world until I got a real internet connection in 1995).

I have at long last got round to trying out this second master socket only to find that the home hub could not make the connection. So did the engineer get it wrong and it is not possible to have two master sockets on the same phone line or is it just that there may be something wrong with the wiring which I might be able to put right? Since the new master sockets were installed walls have been finish plastered and it will now be difficult to hide any new cabling required. ;-(

[Andrew Mawson]

Presumably the line from the first master socket to the second has gone through the adsl filter in the first master socket, letting just voice through

Andrew

[Roger Chapman]

I have just had a look inside the master socket and it looks that way. The incoming blue pair terminate on the A & B connections on the middle layer while the blue pair from the extension terminate at 2 and 5 on the outer layer. I have not as yet had time to see precisely how the 2nd master socket is wired.

So what would happen if I wired these two master sockets in parallel?

[Lee]

Internal phone wiring can, in some cases, impact significantly on ADSL performance let alone vDSL so it's better to leave the master socket and filter where it is, presuming this is terminated at the incoming BT pair.

If you really must change it, then you would need to swap the filter over to the new "master socket" and wire the pairs back in the original master socket.

I'd sooner leave the modem by the original master socket and run some Cat5e :)

[Lee]

Doh, no you don't or plugging any phone will cause problems. All the phone extensions want to go through the filter.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

A master socket contains a capacitor and resistor in series across the line. Adding a second one would double up on this and do gawd knows what to the line. A standard secondary socket has the line simply in parallel with the master.

The best way is to have the BT boxes as close as possible to where the line comes into the house, and then cable from the router using CAT 5 cable - which is designed for fast data transfer, which house telephone wiring is not. Or, of course, use the Wi-Fi side.

[Lee]

Right try again :) On the interstitial filter (at least on mine) there is a 2 pin IDC which you can wire one pair of a CAT5 pair to, I would suggest running that to the location you want the modem and terminating in a suitable socket.

[charles]

Or, you can do what I've done which is to have the splitter at the incoming master socket and run a CAT5 cable from the data output of the splitter to another room where the modem is located.

[Charles F]

I've done something similar with my Zen-fibre-to-the-cabinet setup, as I didn't want either the BT adapter box or the modem/router near the incoming master socket and filters. I spoke to the BT engineer who did the initial installation, and he confirmed that this would be fine provided that the wiring was done in cat 5e or cat 6 - and nothing else. To confirm that this was OK I've measured the up and down speeds with the two boxes at the master socket, and in their final remote location - no difference.

What I have now is a cat 5e feed from the master socket unfiltered output to the input of the BT adapter box, and then directly on to the ASDL modem/router. The cable length used is about 25 metres, and includes a cat

5e wall socket and a 5e patch panel.

Charles F

[Roger Chapman]

BT Infinity is also only fibre to the roadside cabinet (in my case a mere half mile away) despite the misleading adverts. :-(

I am afraid this and some of the other replies are over my head.

I have an extra long lead to connect the home hub to the computer which I intend to use to export the signal to my office if I can manage to hide the cable in the walls upstairs which still have not been plastered.

I will however have to move the real master socket. What do I have to do to avoid upsetting the telephone exchange? Only 2 wires are connected at the master socket but there is an old style junction box on the feed that originally had 3 wires connected. (Now only orange and white). Is there still the potential for a ringer voltage on one of the other wires?

[Old Codger]

You may find one or more of these links helpful. I find the first adequate.

[Robert]

The more recent VDSL filter plate has connections for unfiltered phoneline extensions as well as providing connections for the filtered phoneline. Running a twisted pair cable from the master socket unfiltered connections to another socket in the house and plugging your VDSL modem in there will work and in practice you may see little difference in speed. As has been posted elsewhere the "Master socket" is a red herring it just means that there is surge protection built in and has nothing to do with broadband.

[Charles F]

There were always just two wires on the incoming feed from the exchange, but the UK historically used a three wire system in domestic premises once past the master socket, with he ringing signal separated out onto a third wire. However, modern phones do not need this third wire, so unless you have period phones the third wire is unnecessary, and in fact is depreciated as it tends to reduce the performance of ADSL by partly unbalancing the circuit and making it more prone to interference.

Charles F

[Brian Gaff]

Well, I was in at the end of Micronet, in case you are interested. it was sold by Emap to BT, who could not make it pay, mainly because they are useless! They then closed it. As for your query, it seems logical to me that if the one master works and the other does not there has to be a wiring issue. After all, if it were a loading issue both would not work, surely? Maybe the second master is not supplied as a master, which might in effect make it act the way it does. also of course things can go faulty. Brian

[Roger Chapman]

Thanks. I have bookmarked for future reference since I am having trouble taking in all the information on offer.

#2 goes on at some length about the illegality of interfering with BT's wiring and the dire consequences that can flow from it. BT is no longer a government owned monopoly with the power of life and death over the only telephone system available so is it still a statutory offense to interfere with their wiring and would they really want to lose a paying customer when there is so much competition now?

[Peter Crosland]

I would play hard-ball with BT/Openreach and ask them to fix it free of charge.

[Roger Chapman]

Now there is a thought. ;-)

Why should I mess around with things I don't really understand when it was the Openreach engineer's attempt to be helpful(or perhaps just to save himself time) that led to the present situation.

[Peter Andrews]

I think you will have a hard time getting Openreach to do anything.

Did the engineer install a new cable to your office or is it old BT/PO wiring or something that you installed. As long as the wiring is twisted pair to your office using 'proper' telephone cable, i.e. not B&Q flat extension cable, it should not degrade your broadband signal, after all it has come many yards over a twisted pair already and another 20 yards isn't going to make any difference.

Can you bypass the first socket by extending the external cable using the internal cable to the master in your office? A choc bloc connector would do while testing. If that works you could then use another pair to bring the speech circuit back to the first socket.

Peter Parry has written some notes on socket wiring available at:

Peter

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Difference is it *may* pick up interference from things inside the house.

[Old Codger]

Don't know about legality but I have always played with BT's wiring when I wanted to do something and was capable of doing it correctly and neatly. Even in the old days, prior to NTE5s, I would move the master socket around and add extension sockets wired directly into the BT wiring. More recently, after the introduction of the NTE5 but I still had the old master, the computer was connected to one of a number of extensions. I had a problem and the OpenReach man arrived to investigate. Asked if he would like to see the actual wiring layout (I live in a bungalow so this is easy to see in the loft) he said "Yes". The fact that I was not connected to the master socket was then very apparent. "You would do better to connect to the master" he said. "I know" said I "but it makes negligible difference. I do intend moving the master and have the wiring in ready, direct from your input". "This one" he said. "Yes" said I "and the only reason I have not done it already is that I don't yet have an NTE5 and am not sure if it will fit plaster depth". "I have one in the van" he said, "we will have a look". He gave me an OpenReach NTE5 and the, so called, accelerator plate so I am now fully up to date and official. When FTTC became available OpenReach fitted their modem without any query at all.

I suspect if all is correctly done there will be no problems.

If you have an NTE5 master then you are allowed to run extensions using the connections on the removable front plate, it is only the incoming lead to the "test" socket that is the preserve of BT/OpenReach