Move FTTC socket

I have just got TalkTalk FTTC and it's brilliant only it's not installed in an ideal place, the living room.

The wiring is set up as follows, master socket has a blanking plate that distributes the phone line to two extensions, one upstairs office and the other downstairs in the living room. The living room now has the FTTC faceplate fitted that has a modem output on top and internally two crone connections to direct the filtered vdsl line elsewhere. At the moment I have a powerline set up to send the Ethernet out of the modem to the router and network upstairs but this link is being saturated and could run quicker connected directly.

Would it be possible to move the FTTC filter to the master socket, and connect the extension for upstairs to the crone connections on the filter and then plug the blanking plate back in to reconnect the downstairs extension. This would have downstairs as a phone only socket and upstairs as a data only socket.

Could anyone verify this setup.

In reply to a post by hypnoticcow:

I have just got TalkTalk FTTC and it's brilliant only it's not installed in an ideal place, the living room.

The wiring is set up as follows, master socket has a blanking plate that distributes the phone line to two extensions, one upstairs office and the other downstairs in the living room. The living room now has the FTTC faceplate fitted that has a modem output on top and internally two crone connections to direct the filtered vdsl line elsewhere. At the moment I have a powerline set up to send the Ethernet out of the modem to the router and network upstairs but this link is being saturated and could run quicker connected directly.

Would it be possible to move the FTTC filter to the master socket, and connect the extension for upstairs to the crone connections on the filter and then plug the blanking plate back in to reconnect the downstairs extension. This would have downstairs as a phone only socket and upstairs as a data only socket.

Could anyone verify this setup.

You would be better off if you moved the router so that is next to the modem and use the homeplug to connect to the network upstairs.

Thanks for the quick reply, I did consider this as an option but didn't really want more equipment in the living room and it would still result in a saturated link for the rest of the network.

No.

It sounds strange to start with, and your idea may or may not work depending on exactly what changes the engineer made. Was he a true Openreach guy, or a subcontractor such as Kelly's or Quinn's?

I'm going to ask you a few questions. The answers may help the next person along.

What was the setup before FTTC? Was the one that now has the blanking plate in use as a socket, and was definitely the master? Or was it always a blanking plate, in which case are you sure it isn't just a junction box? A photo uploaded somewhere showing its insides would be very useful.

The one in the living room is now supposed to be the master. It must be an NTE5 for the FTTC faceplate to fit, but it isn't impossible some internals have been removed, or the "blanked" master no longer is a master, or you now have two, which isn't ideal.

This is why your idea, whilst fine, and in principle achieveable one way or another, possibly isn't as simple as you describe.

Incidentally, the VDSL2 line is not filtered. It carries everything that came in from outside. The filters are bi-directional and remove anything outside the audible range from the lines to the phones, and back in from those lines. To the phones because with the broadband signal on it you woudn't be able to hear a conversation, back in because any non-audible "noise" picked up by the wire has to be prevented from getting back in and screwing up the broadband signal in the same way.

The correct setup, that the engineer should have been able to do, would give you phone and FTTC in the office, phone only in the living room, and depending on what is going on at that intermediate box possibly a phone there if it previously had one.

What bandwidth Homeplug?

A minimum 200Mbps specification seems to be required for FTTC, certainly if you are above the 40Mbps area. 500Mbps ones are being recommended by some people.

I had a similar problem and found I had to "upgrade" to 500Mbps Homeplugs to make any difference. I now get 62 Meg at my PC, measured using the TBB tester.

Post deleted by 4M2

Thanks for the advice.

I have done a bit more research and I have just decided to set it up as the worst case was I just move everything back to how it was. So I connected the extension upstairs though the filtered IDC terminal of the Openreach faceplate which I now moved to the original master with NTE5b on the front.

This then allows the downstairs extension to be voice only and upstairs to be vdsl2 only as i wanted. Also as expected now I have removed the bottleneck my speeds have went up also, see below

Before
http://speedtest.net/result/2434271973.png

After
http://www.speedtest.net/result/2435134094.png