Relocating a BT line

Hi all,

Does the panel have any tips for getting hold of someone at BT to organise our incoming line being shifted? I'm fed up with being told, once I get through to a human, that an engineer will call me back, only to hear nothing. Is there a specific number I should try?

The longer story: Our line comes in on overhead wires to a pair of insulators on the end gable of the house. Then a manky bit of twin core comes into the house through a hole drilled in a window frame and terminates in an absolutely ancient GPO box. After another downstream junction box of dubious vintage there is a modern phone outlet. The window is being replaced, so the incoming line will have to be rewired, hopefully to terminate in something a little tidier and less obtrusive.

Thanks in advance

Luke

Reply to
Luke Newman
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Start a small business and put an advert in the local paper advertising it, BT will immediately ensure that your telephone line is of top quality, to allow the maximum number of calls in the longest possible time, from members of the Yellow Pages advertising sales team. Worked for me. :)

-- Regards, Mike Halmarack

Drop the EGG to email me.

Reply to
Mike Halmarack

Ask for broadband to be installed. This requires a new NTE (the GPO box) so they can do the wiring while they're there.

Reply to
Mike

The poster already stated the line terminated on a modern socket so ordering broadband will do no good as hes got somewhere to plug the filters into and BT would not need to call.

Reply to
Pilbs

What part of the country you in ?

Reply to
Pilbs

Rural Perthshire, Scotland. And yes, broadband and voice work perfectly, so I can hardly report this as a fault, or can I?

Luke

Reply to
Luke Newman

If th existing overhead is sound simply terminate it elsewhere and feed it through the wall to any old junction box, and then use cat 5 or telephone 2 pair to take it where you want.

As far as BT is concerned, if their enginreers find a connection between the exchange and their master socket, they could not give a damn about whats in between IME.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

BT guidelines are to remove the old GPO boxes when installing ADSL.

Reply to
Mike

I work with BT a lot, on the guys and girls email we get 3 statements, one of which is :-

BT's Customer Promise: We make every experience simple and complete.

I think you are not getting this level of service, and should phone up and ask to speak to "complaints".

Rick

Reply to
Rick

Why not move it yourself?

Reply to
John Rumm

I'm in the same situation. I had broadband set up and no change was made to the old GPO box I have. I rang BT and asked if they would replace it with a plugin style master socket and I think the cost was some way over £150 ! Bit reluctant to fiddle with the old box as there are fragile wires all stuffed in and I'm sure I'd never get them back in the right place (though if anyone can direct me to a wiring diagram I guess that might help?)

Thanks

Paul

Reply to
Paul

Ther are only two wires which connect you to the exchange, and the way round they are is not important.

Identify those, extend them and put your own master box in.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

That's supposed to be true for all phone appliances, and it is for most (back in the days of GPO/BT approvals, it used to be tested). However there are some that don't work properly if the line is reversed. Some caller display units have been the more recent culprits, including modems with that function built in (Hayes fixed it in later models of theirs).

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Try these :-

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Jeff

Reply to
Jeff

There are only two wires incoming and three from the master to other sockets, although it's usual to connect four. You can identify the polarity of the incoming pair with a DC volt meter.

Here are the standard colours of cable, flex and their terminals.

Old Terminal Cable Cord Function 1 Green/white Orange Spare Blue 2 Blue/white Red B wire (Line) -50v Brown 3 Orange/white Blue Shunt wire. (Bell) Green 4 White/orange Green Local earth (Not usually used) Orange 5 White/blue White A wire (Line) 0v 6 White/green Black Spare

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

It's not 'important' how you connect mains line and neutral either in that most things will still work. But not good practice.

Stick a DVM which reads over 50 volts DC across the line. With a positive reading from that, the positive is terminal 5 and the negative terminal 2

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

That's more than a little depressing. I sat on three years of committees planning the ADSL rollout and we all agreed this was the ideal time to replace random old boxes with proper NTE5s FOC. Seems somebody who doesn't understand the problem has decided to save 3s&6d (to use and old expression) by ignoring that. I'll check it out.

Reply to
Mike

In the best traditions of Usenet (ignoring your substantive, and hugely worthwhile point) - wasn't it 3s4d? In the old expression/comms-garbling tale - where the original message 'send reinforcements, we're going to advance' gets passed back to HQ as 'send three-n-fourpence, we're going to a dance'?

Or were you thinking of a different Old Expression?

Stefek

Reply to
Stefek Zaba

No. You're right. Sign of age.

Reply to
Mike

I am FAIRLY sure that any phone/PABX 'to spec' WILL work. those thet take power have full wave rectifiers and I am ALMOST sure that teh voice signal has to be tansformer coupled anway..

No harm in doing things a standard way tho ;-)

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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