Just back from searching without luck for a suitable faceplate. That image shows the faceplate in the hallway and there has only ever been one phone in the house, which has always been there. My father is 76 now and clueless about these things, but would have just called an electrician to do this and left him to it. The house is around 80 years old, so I'm working under the assumption that nothing is really ideal with the wiring, but I'm slightly surprised that Vodafone are so blasé about it.

That wire from underneath the faceplate traces all round the hallway and then continues around the edge of the lounge to a point where it goes into the wall near the bay window and then pops out the wall behind the TV, before connecting to the router via a micro-filter, so it's a very odd setup. I think it was only ever done this way because the old Sky boxes were not wifi enabled presumably and required an ethernet connection.

EDIT: I've just recalled that he paid BT about £3 a month for around 30+ years to rent a stupid bell in the hallway that was wired up there somewhere as well. I'm pretty sure it's gone now, but there may be some wiring still there.

Edited by charlestown (Sat 31-Mar-18 17:47:54)

Sky may have used cw1308 twisted pair cable when creating the extension (?) so that may be in your favour, in the short term, if you can not make up a "data extension" using a filtered faceplate etc. immediately.

I think he would prefer to keep the router in the lounge for cosmetic reasons, simply to avoid having it on the cabinet in the hallway, but I know he'd change his mind immediately if the internet was suddenly unusable.

I'm pretty sure that faceplate and the wiring was just put there by a local electrician. The idea is to go there on Monday and set up the new router for him, then go back on Tuesday when it all goes live to see how it's working. Presumably I'll have to keep the micro-filters in place temporarily if we don't have the new faceplate there before it goes live. I think the Vodafone router comes with a couple of their own.

In reply to a post by 4M2:

Sky may have used cw1308 twisted pair cable when creating the extension (?) so that may be in your favour, in the short term, if you can not make up a "data extension" using a filtered faceplate etc. immediately.

What socket is he going to fit a filtered faceplate to ? Certainly not the one in the hall.

Even if he could, it would make zilch difference.

If I find him a Mk4 OpenReach faceplate like mine shown in this image, presumably I could unscrew both the faceplate and the existing holder, then rewire it or is this something better left to Open Reach? I'm guessing Vodafone would only OK an engineer visit if speeds were really dreadful.

Edited by charlestown (Sat 31-Mar-18 18:51:14)

Have a look inside the socket in the lounge as well as the one in the hall. Are you sure the one in the lounge was only fitted after the one in the hall?

I would like to know where the phone line reaches the house and how it gets from there to the master. (Which I'm suggesting may not be in the hall).

You've got little chance of altering anything significantly before the FTTC goes live, bar one important thing. You can gently remove the ring wire at the master when you find it and curl it out of the way. Don't cut it. The phone and broadband wires are on terminals 2 and 5. The bell wire is on terminal 3. The important end of it to remove is at the master. Far less important at non-masters but some people like to do those as well.

Remember, it is going to work just like now. Just probably degraded, and a possibility of instability. You are right to want to clean it up, but don't panic . Given the high estimates I doubt if the speed will be below 40Mbps connection anyway, but instability could clobber it after a few days.

An explanation of the bell wire, with a picture showing the inside of the NTE5A and faceplate. As you can see, the faceplate is only part of the front of the socket, but your picture shows a non-split front. There is no filtered faceplate to fit your photo'ed socket. The speed difference quoted there is for ADSL/ADSL2+. For FTTC it is far greater.

Problem is the hallway socket and what happens within and before that even if the router was connected there.

However good quality supplied dangly filters might be OK if the extension cable is cw1308, the extension bell wire is not connected and there are no other extensions in the property. This set up is perhaps the best you can hope for in the short term if the router is required to be located in the lounge.

In the longer term the house wiring needs to be examined and preferably a "data extension" using a master NTE5 fitted with a filtered faceplate leading to a dedicated rj11 socket in the lounge. (Or even better a NTE5 located in the lounge.) This I'm sure you had in mind when considering getting a filtered faceplate and using the current extension running to the lounge.

Good luck.

There is no socket as such in the lounge. It's just a wire leading from the bottom of the faceplate in the hallway that is tacked around the edge of the skirting board and goes into the lounge. It eventually plugs into a micro-filter and from there to the router.

Your socket is the latest NTE5C. A completely different design of master socket even from the split faceplate NTE5A most of us have and you probably had previously.

You can have one of those fitted at your Dad's, but unless you were lucky it would cost well over £100. The whole socket would have to be replaced, not just the faceplate.

As I've also said, I'm not convinced the one in the hall is a master, but looking inside it will solve that.

Is a phone needed in the hall?

I just have too many doubts about that wiring to make any safe suggestions other than the bell wire one until you are able to look around the house on Monday and get some answers . The insurance policy is that it is going to work even if you do nothing.

Is your Dad's a long way away?

The hallway sits in the middle between the lounge and the dining room where he has the computer, so it should be pretty easy to obtain a stable wifi connection and to me it would make sense eliminating the wiring going into the lounge.