Without actually seeing what BT cable points are in the house already its difficult to say for sure...

If you are having a BT phone line activated then it will usually include a engineer visit and they will within a reasonable set of rules locate the master socket at place you ask, though things like running it from the hallway up the stairs and into a room upstairs may stretch things. Having some CAT5e Ethernet cable in place with the spare length as suggested will often mean they will happily use that.

On the distance is everything and you don't want a lot of cabling, while true, the effect of 5 to 10m of good cable that rather than cheap aluminium (and if buying CAT5E ensure it is copper and not CCA) is minimal, unless you are going to worry about getting 36 Mbps rather than 37.5 Mbps. On the interference aspect so long as twisted pair cabling is used some proximity to mains wiring where it cannot be avoided should be OK too, i.e. best practice has been quoted at you.

A single run of cat5E will carry both the phone and broadband and you can then split them out using the usual connectors/filters at the final destination and is better than running a 'broadband' and a 'phone' cable.

Ignore all the coax cable and Virgin Media stuff the Openreach installers won't touch it.

Accepting you don't know all the acronyms I posted, (they are the various ways you can get broadband on the BT Openreach network), it does matter that we check one thing. The FTTP type is a completely different kind of setup and your work could well be irrelevant.

Please could you go to the BT Wholesale checker and on that page choose the Address option. Your current phone number won't work and the Postcode option is no use to you either.

If you can upload a screenshot of the results somewhere (remove your address from it but include the rest of the line above the table) then give us a link to it would be brilliant. That will tell us what options you are likely to have. We don't need the text below the table.

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 27-Sep-18 11:46:28)

Hello Roberto

I was just about to take the advice already given on the forum and use cat 5e, but if you don't mind doing a further check before I buy some that would be great.

I'll fit it as Zarjaz suggested leaving a coil of spare at each end just in case some extra cable is needed.

https://www.freephotoupload.com/images/2018/09/27/BT...
https://www.freephotoupload.com/images/2018/09/27/Ca...

Just to recap a single length of CAT 5e is all I will need to do both the telephone and broadband because it has 4 pairs of wires.
The cable in my image is an all copper one so I assume that will do the job.


Thanks again Trooper

The incoming phone line has just 2 wires, 1 pair

You can use the Cat5e to extend that pair to where ever in the home and fit the master socket there, then you connect the microfilter that gives you a phone socket and a DSL socket. A few metres of CAT5e will make little different to the speed, the problems arise when you start adding extension sockets

Worst case scenario and engineer only installs the master in the hall, then connect the cat5e to the extension connectors (and never plug any phones in at the master socket) and at the end install a socket like https://amzn.to/2OVpVY3 which has the filter for phone and a DSL socket built in

That's great. Those VDSL lines are the important ones and will use your planned wiring. The figures shown are the connection speed range you would expect if you ordered a fibre connection. They will help you decide between BT-style fibre and your existing VM service.

Two other points. First, do BT telephone lines there come from poles, or are they underground all the way to inside the house? If they come from a pole and yours were removed then there is a chance you could have the entry point somewhere else. If yours are still there they would normally be used.

Second, you are not forced to buy your non-VM broadband from BT Retail. The lines are provided by Openreach to over a hundred other providers including Sky and TalkTalk, and BT Wholesale supply BT Retail and most of those others with the broadband.

So you can choose between BT Retail, (currently called BT Consumer I think), Sky, TalkTalk, TalkTalk resellers who provide a higher standard product than TalkTalk Retail, and those hundred or so using BT Wholesale.

There is a "Which ISP" forum on this site . And on the Main Site a list of providers and a search facility.

Good luck .

Hello again Roberto

The BT telephone line comes from a post, as far as the figures shown concerning the connection speeds, I really don�t know how much difference the speed would make to me.

Let me put you right in the picture, I�ve been with VM for about 13 years and NTL before that who VM took over, the package I was on with VM was Vivid 200, telephone and TV.
If my wife and I watch TV provided by 6 broadcasting companies that�s as many as we watch.
We don�t watch things like the discovery and history channels, likewise the sports channels, in other words all the TV viewing we do could be watched using Freeview.

I don�t do gaming over the internet either my eyeballs wouldn't keep up with it , but having said that our bill with VM was going to go up to £50 per month so I contacted VM and told them I didn�t need TV in the package and someone there worked a price out for me without TV which came to £55 per month, yes that�s right dearer than with TV in the package balmy or what.

After being in contact with their customer leaving department the deal didn�t seem much better, so I thought it was time for a move.
I must admit other providers speeds seemed much slower but then I got to thinking is it something I could live with given I�m only really using the internet for browsing.
In fact, I�d contacted BT and made arrangements for an engineer to call and make the connections, date all set, when out of the blue I got another phone call from VM, but this time with a better price which will be without the TV in the bundle and a drop to Vivid 100.

I can live with that speed, more than likely I could probably get away with 50mps which is what seems to be on offer from other providers I�ve contacted.

I will stay with VM for now, but as I said some time back in the posting we will be
re-carpeting the house so what better time to put a cable in, it just means I can always go with another provider and don�t have to rip carpets up because I don�t want cables clipped along skirting boards and up door architraves.

All this technology, that�s the problem when one comes from the era when the nearest thing you could get to a calculator was logarithm�s and antilogarithm's or if you were really clever a slide rule.

Again, Roberto I am so very grateful for your time and help, I guess as a silver surfer I�m still trying to keep up with the speed of change.

Trooper

In reply to a post by trooper744:

All this technology, that�s the problem when one comes from the era when the nearest thing you could get to a calculator was logarithm�s and antilogarithm's or if you were really clever a slide rule.

Again, Roberto I am so very grateful for your time and help, I guess as a silver surfer I�m still trying to keep up with the speed of change.

Thanks for that . Just one thing.
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I'm 74.

No offence was meant by my last comment about coming from the era of slide rules, I was referring to myself at 75.

I�m that bad I still don�t know how to get to any replies I get on this forum, I�m having to do it through my e-mail alerts.

MrSaffron

Thank you for the link I�ve made a note of it for future reference.