Other Home phone line wires

I've been redecorating the house the past few weeks and today I unscrewed the phone line socket to paint the wall, I noticed that there was a bunch of unused wires and 2 of them were stripped and unused, does this look right? Only had broadband connected today and its pretty slow.



Sorry for the terrible quality

 

modern phone lines only use two wires now

 

What speeds are you getting?

 

looks fine, but make sure any bares don't short out on the back of the socket, as that can cause issues

 

You might also get better speeds if you replace the socket with a proper BT NTE5 socket with a broadband faceplate - your socket looks like it might have seen better days

As far as broadband speeds go, what were you promised when you ordered? If it's much, much lower than the speed you were promised, it might be worth going back to your provider and complaining. Best to leave it settle down for a week or so before you do this - your speed will probably be going up and down over the next few days while the exchange equipment finds a suitable speed (if you complain now, the provider will only tell you to wait, so you might as well wait and then complain if it's still low)

 

Stirctly speaking you shouldn't touch this wiring it "should" only be done by a BT engineer. your only allowed to touch wireing forward of the Master socket (which in this case I would assume this plate is as you don't have a moderm NTE5)

 

Good point, I'd forgotten about that. Unfortunately, it's something which BT will charge £100+ to do

 

I'm not saying don't do it, just deny all knowlege of it if BT ever ask (or hang on to the old plate and put it back as it was before calling a BT engineer.) In my experience the BT engineers don't care if its not the right plate / cable / whatever as long as they can get it working and get on to there next job.

 

Change the plate (assuming you're confident/happy to do so), and tell 'em it was the previous occupier... simples!

 

Assuming that's the master socket, the extra pairs are there, should you require additional lines or your service pair goes bad. As a matter of course, I normally snip off exposed copper. That wall plate looks to be a relatively modern IDC connector, so I would leave it unless you have a compelling reason to change it.

 

Not necessarily, Gareth. I also have a non-NTE5 master socket - the builder had already installed bog-standard sockets and when the BT engineer installed the line, they connected to that socket rather than replace it with an NTE5. The socket might also have been installed a while ago, prior to the introduction of the two-part faceplace - my mum's house has one of these as the main (and only) socket.

TL;DR: Just because it doesn't look like a current 2-part master socket, it doesn't mean that it isn't a master socket.

 

@ the OP I would definitely change that to a NTE5 you'll get better speeds for sure just because the BT engineer didn't doesn't mean it shouldn't be done from my experience BT engineers do as little as possible so unless they are told there's a problem they just connect up and leave as is.

And that isn't a Master socket it would have a test socket if it was.

 

it could be a master socket, if it has never been updated, those cables look very old, as does the socket

 

Its a LJU3 Master socket, their about a decade plus old, their are quite a few non-net5 master sockets- as long as wires 2 & 5 are connected it should be fine, you may need 3.

 

definitely wont want 3 if you have broadband on the line, as it will cause interference

 

True ^^ - the current NTE5 frontplates don't connect the third (ringer) line as it has been known to cause problems with broadband speeds.

 

That certainly is an old style master socket because you can see the yellow capacitor... BT switched to the NTE5 so that the customer could easily disconnect their extensions for testing purposes.

There are 2 wires feeding in to the socket and then you would use 3 wires away to each extension socket. The third wire connected to pin 3 and was known as the bell wire. This was to make the extension fones ring.

Whilst that type of socket only has insulation displacement connections (Krone), I'm sure that NTE5s still use cross head screws for the incoming feed.

The cable in the photo looks like it's a 5 pair underground cable feeding into the socket.

The twisted pairs are colour coded so you would have a colour and a white wire to make the pair. The coding is blue, orange, green, brown and slate