You may get a short-term lower sync tonight, because connections made when it is dark are often a bit slower. Don't worry, a disconnect/reconnect in daylight hours will fix it.

Zarjaz: you're a genius!

Took the faceplate off. Extension 1 - dead. 2 - dead. 3 - dead and so on.

Extension 6? A dial tone!

And now I remember! When the house was built we moaned about the lack of a phone socket in an upstairs bedroom!

They must have bridge tapped it!

[FWIW the connection is about 2 mbps faster now I've turned the modem off and on. Coincidence I'm sure.]

Edited to add sincere apologies for the over-use of exclamation marks haha

Edited by deleted (Wed 12-Feb-14 21:09:27)

That answers your question earlier

In reply to a post by Brookzy:

When you questioned whether it was an Openreach engineer or Quinn's - what would the difference be in terms of the install?

So I guess an Openreach engineer would have spotted the bridge tap and fixed it?

Annoying. So how would I go about fixing this, and how many piggy banks are going to have to get smashed? Haha

Did BT install the bedroom extension?

Almost certainly not. It's bound to have been the useless electrical contractor Electract I've ranted about before.

So there IS a bridge tap .......

In theory, if all else fails, report slow speeds to your ISP and the Brandenberg test system should pick it up, and you'll get an engineer out.

OR ......

How's your place fed, over head or underground ? You need to to establish where the feed comes in, and where the sparks bodged in the connection.
This might take some photo's being taken by you .......

The house is fed underground. And here's where it gets interesting...

Late last year, we mysteriously lost all connection. Phone wouldn't get a tone in the test socket etc.

A BT engineer came and he said that we had a backup line and switched us to that. Somehow, the existing cable had fractured about 5 yards from the junction box, likely due to block paving work on the drive.

The plot thickens.

What sort of photos are you requiring? I'll do a search around for what cables I can see in the daylight.

One more thing... I have a VDSL microfilter from a previous FTTC connection I had from a company called Vtesse Networks. (Long story... They arrived before Openreach FTTC, closed late last year by Ofcom due to noncompliance and they weren't profitable anyway).
So, should I try plugging the Openreach modem into the extension that is from the bridge tap using that microfilter?

A BT engineer came and he said that we had a backup line and switched us to that. Somehow, the existing cable had fractured about 5 yards from the junction box, likely due to block paving work on the drive.

It is very common for the underground feed to a property to have more than one pair in it, the engineer has used a spare pair to restore service, common practice, and acceptable/expected.

What sort of photos are you requiring? I'll do a search around for what cables I can see in the daylight.

Where does the UG feed appear ? In a grey box on the wall outside ? If so, a picture, with the lid removed of this, so we can see the terminations in there please. Have a shufty and see if you can establish what goes where cable wise. Can you see where the feed to the rogue extension runs from ?

Just having a quick look now.

I take it the last part of my post is a bad idea?

And many thanks for all your time and expertise in this!