Getting ready for FTTC

Hi all,

So hopefully by the end of June my exchange will be FTTC ready so I'm thinking about what I can do to make sure I get the best speeds.

When we moved in the house was completely re-decorated and I ripped out all the manky old cabling/extensions and wired up brand new ones with decent quality Cat5e cable. The master socket was a brand new one NTE5 one with filtered faceplate installed by BT when we had the line reconnected when we moved in (previous owners were on NTL, but the BT line from the pole was physically there already).

So all good so far. However...

The cable from the pole does not go directly into the master socket. It terminates up on the soffits on the house and goes into a little white junction box. Out of this junction box we have what can only be described as cheap [censored] speaker wire. It's clear-jacket, stranded non twisted pair stuff.

So we have:

Fairly recent cable from pole(good)-->junction box-->[censored] cable to master socket (about 10m or so)-->my awesome cat5e internal wiring. Now of course this is on BTs side of the equation so I have to leave it alone (although it's easily reached by my ladder!) but is it something the FTTC engineer will replace when infinity is installed, or will it be a case of it works OK so it'll be left?

We have a BE ADSL2+ connection right now which has never given any problems so perhaps it will be OK. I just read things that suggest VDSL2 might not like a non-UTP cable in its link.

In reply to a post by AndrewUK:

Fairly recent cable from pole(good)-->junction box-->[censored] cable to master socket (about 10m or so)-->my awesome cat5e internal wiring. Now of course this is on BTs side of the equation so I have to leave it alone (although it's easily reached by my ladder!) but is it something the FTTC engineer will replace when infinity is installed, or will it be a case of it works OK so it'll be left?

I should think it is extremely unlikely that the engineer would touch it if everything apparently works. Your arrangement is similar to mine except that the cable that comes out of the junction box on the soffit appears to be of the same type as the one that goes into it. I think you will just have to wait and see, if there is a problem after the installation it should show up on the engineer's test equipment.

The engineer will leave it most likely. If you changed it with BT spec cable I highly doubt anyone would know. Of course it's against t&cs etc and you should obviously know what you're doing before you start.

I had exactly this issue when I moved into my house; my internal wiring was fine, but the drop cable from the junction box on the side of my house into my property was ancient, untwisted wire with the shielding worn off in numerous places.

At the time I had really poorly-performing ADSL2+ with lots of speed problems and outages so I had numerous visits from Openreach engineers. At one of the visits I pointed out the drop cable and the engineer immediately replaced it (a 30 minute job, including a bit of drilling to get the thicker wire through into my hallway).

It didn't really help any of the issues I had at the time, but when I got FTTC in September it undoubtedly helped.

Edited by mrbiggs (Mon 30-Apr-12 17:15:05)

In reply to a post by mrbiggs:

It didn't really help any of the issues I had at the time, but when I got FTTC in September it undoubtedly helped.

Good to have it changed, but given that it didn't help your ADSL and that you didn't have FTTC before it was changed, I'm not sure how you can say it "undoubtedly" helped.

I recently did something similar, as a test, replacing the 50-year-old corroded GPO wiring between my junction box and master socket. While not clear jacket speaker cabling (not that that's bad - speaker cabling works surprisingly well for FTTC VDSL2) - it looked ancient, corroded and of horrible quality. It looked worse than the Virgin Media cable that reduced my line rate from 90mbps down to 15mbps (don't ask).

Replaced it with a shorter length of high quality Cat 6 twisted pair. The difference between the two was virtually nil - perhaps about 0.5dB difference in attenuation and 0.2% difference in attainable line rate, which in my case is entirely limited by crosstalk noise. So I don't expect to see the difference. Clear jacket speaker cable is unlikely to be worse than what I had. By all means give it a go if you have problems after installation, but I wouldn't mess about with it unnecessarily.

Edited by qasdfdsaq (Mon 30-Apr-12 18:37:49)

Thanks for the replies. I will just leave it and see how we get on. We've had no probs with ADSL2+ as I said so I won't bother trying to fix a problem that may not exist!

In reply to a post by kasg:

In reply to a post by mrbiggs:

It didn't really help any of the issues I had at the time, but when I got FTTC in September it undoubtedly helped.

Good to have it changed, but given that it didn't help your ADSL and that you didn't have FTTC before it was changed, I'm not sure how you can say it "undoubtedly" helped.

Because shoving VDSL2 down a modern, insulated, twisted-pair drop cable is highly likely to have given a better outcome than several meters of brittle, barely insulated 40-year-old untwisted bellwire.

I'll concede I don't have the stats to prove that, so if it makes you feel better, I'll acknowledge that there is a chance it may not have helped.

In reply to a post by mrbiggs:

I'll concede I don't have the stats to prove that, so if it makes you feel better, I'll acknowledge that there is a chance it may not have helped.

I can assure you that my feelings don't enter into it, I was only concerned with facts.