Wiring Extensions into Telephone Master Socket

[Bob]

I will shortly be getting my master socket replaced with an NTE5 and I am taking the opportunity to rationalise the extension wiring. I have a short, medium and long term plan for this:

1. Initially I can get it down to two extensions - one is the link to the burglar alarm and the other is an extension to the study upstairs where the main telephone and the router are both plugged in. This relies on an ADSL microfilter/splitter at the extension socket. This arrangement has to stay in place for a while during work in the hall.

1. In the medium term, the main telephone can move down to the hall and be plugged directly into the master socket. I want to install an ADSL splitter faceplate, so that the extension to the study becomes a dedicated filtered ADSL line.

2. In the longer term, I want to move the router down to the hall to be plugged directly into the master socket. At that point, the study will be served by ethernet lines from the router and I will be down to a single extension from the master socket (for the burglar alarm).

To this end, I have installed cat5e cables from the hall to the study and I intend to use these for the various purposes outlined above. It is the initial stage that I am wondering about. The problem is that I need both extensions to be connected to the unfiltered connection in the master socket. But unless I use cat5e for the burglar alarm connection (which I don't want to assume will be possible as it's out of my control to some extent), as I understand it I can't mix cable types in the same IDC connector. I have seen junction boxes but they only seem to have one set of connectors coming in and one coming out. My thought is to do something like the following:

Connect two (normal, same type) telephone cables into the unfiltered master socket connections. One goes to the burglar alarm, the other is just a short piece to a junction box. I then connect the cat5e to the other side of the JB.

Does this sound reasonable? If so, a follow up question is: where do I put the JB? I am planning to fit a flush mounted back box (as for a standard mains socket) to take the NTE5. Will there be enough room in there? Or do I need another single socket box next to it to house the JB, perhaps with a blank plate on it? This would be a bit of a pain as the JB is only needed in the short term.

In case it helps, I was planning to mount a double socket back box next to the NTE5 anyway, with a modular faceplate for the ethernet sockets. Maybe there would be enough room in here for the JB?

Thanks and sorry for what has turned into a long post.

[Owain]

Use a faceplate with a microfilter in the hall. Run a 'filtered' pair to the alarm. Run a cable with 'filtered' (for the phone) and 'unfiltered' pairs (for the router) to the study.

The ADSL line is *not* filtered, it's the phones that need the filter.

If you use a faceplate with a microfilter in the hall, you don't need to change anything at this point.

At this point disconnect the 'unfiltered' pair at the microfilter. The study retains its filtered phone socket.

Phones (and alarms) must be connected to the *filtered* extensions. An NTE microfilter front plate has seperate terminals for filtered and unfiltered.

There are a variety of junction boxes

80A 3-pole, screw terminal to IDC 77B 6-pole, screw terminal to screw terminal 77A 6-pole, IDC to IDC 84A 6-pole, screw terminal to IDC

You must wire the alarm to the FILTERED terminals.

Run a Cat5 cable to your alarm location and terminate the FILTERED pair in a junction box (preferably one with an anti-tamper contact in the lid), or the IDC side of an 80A would do. Then Mr Alarm can use the screw terminals.

Run a Cat5 cable to the study and terminate the filtered and unfiltered pairs in a dual faceplate with BT socket for the filtered phone and RJ11 for the unfiltered ADSL.

You then do not require any junction boxes or need to move or alter anything.

Run a 2nd Cat5 cable between hall and study for the future Ethernet use. Terminate on RJ45 at each end.

Owain

[Bob]

Hi Owain

Thanks for the reply, which I will digest tomorrow when I am more awake.

Sorry about the confusion - I got the filtered/unfiltered the wrong way round but I knew what I meant!

Bob

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Owain writes

Not sure I like this. You have two stubs running from the NTE5 sharing the same cable. It seems to me that would just turn it into a large antenna which would pick up all kinds of crap.

I'd suggest fitting a filtered faceplate in the hall, and running the extension to the study as an unfiltered line, using a microfilter with the phone. Then when the OP wants to relocate the phone to the hall, all he has to do is dump the microfilter and plug the phone into the filtered faceplate.

The filtered side of the faceplate is connected to the burglar alarm.

[Andy Dingley]

Use an NTE with an ADSL filter built in to the faceplate. You might get one from BT, you can buy them for a tenner. Don't use a microfilter.

Place this filter adjacent to your router. Don't run long cables for the ADSL-only connection. Either place the router near to the socket (you probably have an answering machine / cordless basestation there anyway) and run long 100BaseT network cables to it if you have to. Otherwise have BT place the master socket at the far end of the house, adjacent to the router, all to keep this filter /. router connection short.

Buy a proper Krone / punchdown tool with a real steel jaw for wiring the extensions and use real solid core cable, not stranded cable.

[george [dicegeorge]]

What's wrong with a microfilter?

I wouldn't wire in extensions, but have them unplugable, so if there's a fault you can go to a clean empty master socket and plug in a phone or a router. and BT wont be able to blame your extensions for their faults.

I agree the router should be very near to the master socket.

[g]

[chris French]

If you have an NTE5 master socket, then extension are wired into the bottom part of the faceplate.

This can be removed and there is a test socket behind, which is connected to the incoming BT cable

[Dave Liquorice]

Wire to the back of the lower half of the NTE only. When you remove the lower half you disconnect everything from the line revealing a "test" socket that the lower half plugs into when in place.

[Bob]

Thanks for the replies. I suspect that the nub of my question was a bit too buried but I was trying to provide background as to why I am in the situation that I am in and what the constraints are.

Bearing in mind that my 'medium term' plan is to make full use of a filtered face plate and my long term plan is to get the router as close to the master socket as possible, it is really the short term that I am a bit stuck with.

Here are my constraints:

1. I need to have the phone and the router in the study for now.
2. I have put cat5e in place between the hall and the study and am banned from any more furniture moving, lifting floorboards in the relevant upstairs rooms so that cable is what I have to work with now.
3. An extension to the burglar alarm needs to be wired in.
4. The burglar alarm extension uses normal telephone extension cable.

Now it is possible that this last point can be relaxed but I don't want to assume this will be possible and I want to figure out what to do if that is the case.

So I need - in the short term - to connect two extensions to the master socket. Now my assumption was - and I am beginning to see the light as I write this! - that both of those would need to go in the same connectors of the filtered faceplate and that is where I saw the problem as I understand that I can't mix cat5 and normal extension cabling in the same IDC slots because of different wire thicknesses.

However - based on what Owain says - if I use the filtered connector for the burglar alarm and the unfiltered connector for the phone / router, I can use a microfilter splitter in the study for the phone and router. I know this is not ideal but it is more or less what I am doing now (at the end of a plug in extension kit) and it is only to tide me over.

Am I correct? Look "Separate terminals for telephone and ADSL extensions, if so required ,are provided at the rear of the plate. Separate extension sockets would now have to be run for the telephone line and the ADSL line as they are now split at the Master ."

So despite what it says, is it the case that I could use the ADSL extension for both phone and router by splitting at the far end? What I assumed initially was that, once split at the faceplate, the ADSL extension could *only* be used for ADSL.

[george [dicegeorge]]

thanks Chris and Dave, I now know that an NTE5 is what the man fitted last week replacing the old one which had 'PO' on it , predating BT! [g]

[Andy Dingley]

Lots!

Mostly that it's a heavy protruding lump hanging outboard of a loose plug and socket. In practical terms (i.e. phone calls to ISPs), a stupid amount of trouble is caused by that one single connection going floppy and electrically noisy, usually after vacuum cleaner damage.

Get an ADSL faceplate for your NTE.

[Dave Liquorice]

I use a BT badged MF50 microfilter because it works better overall than an ADSL Nation faceplate. The face plate gave better sync rates during the day but once the MF broadcast noise appears at night it couldn't sustain that rate and would drop back lower than what the MF50 could do 24/7.

What is more important is to only have one filter and feed all you POTS stuff from that filter and keep the unfiltered feed to the ADSL modem as short as possible.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Dave Liquorice writes

Oh, come on. It's travelled several km from the exchange already in waterlogged underground ducting. A few more metres is going to make no difference.

[Dave Liquorice]

But it's very well shielded in it's wet, underground, duct. If I turn off my LCD monitor it makes a 250 to 500kbps increase in the sync rate that the modem can achieve. Admitedly there is less than 2' between the monitor and modem but the home is a relatively noisy place electrically and in close proximity to the wires.

[Bob Eager]

Except that it's potentially in a much noisier enevironment.