Baffling problem

I'm trying to help someone with a poor broadband connection. Their house wiring is 50 years old and extensive, also our village is far from the exchange. Their broadband has always been marginal but is now not connecting. I'm trying to get BT to install an NTE5A to replace the 1950's black bakelite box where the incoming cable leads to (as far as I can tell - it is a rats' nest!) I can't connect a broadband accelerator as the master socket is pre 1981, and I don't think the cable into the house goes directly to it. I won't bore you with my conversations with BT, suffice it to say they don't seem to understand the subject at all.

The puzzle
They have a BT Voyager 220 router. I thought I would disconnect the wire at connection 3 on the sockets, hoping to reduce interference and get the connection working. When I did this, the router stops blinking its ADSL light and gives up trying. I logged into it and instead of the usual status of Training or Handshaking it simply says Down. Reconnecting wire 3 in the socket makes it start trying to connect again.

I checked the little cable from the router to the splitter and it only has two connecting wires, as I would expect. So how can the router possibly know or care that I have disconnected wire 3???

I just cannot understand it. Please help.

It may be there is a problem with the wiring, such that the ADSL is only making to the modem by virtue of cross talk, or at some point pin 3 is wired to 2 or 5.

Getting a new NTE5 should be a case of phoning up and requesting it, then parting with the £25+VAT. If you go for the re-doing all the extension stuff then that would add to the price.

Photo's can help people figure things, particularly if a diagram can be drawn showing which picture applies to which socket in the property.

Thanks.

I went to the old type master socket, disconnected wire 3. A phone plugged into it works fine, so 2 and 5 must be working. Now plugged in ADSL cable to the same socket, and still the same thing. The router says "Down". Reconnect 3 and it blinks again. This seems to eliminate any possiblily of wiring errors being the explanation. I'm baffled.

I'm going to try another router.

Unless your line is extremely long, ADSL should (abliet slowly) even if just one wire was connected.

ADSL can work with just one wire, a phone MUST have both.

If you can trace the A&B from the outside world to pins 2 and 5 on the socket you are using, then time to look closer at microfilter and the ADSL lead. (If using an old modem lead for the ADSL modem - you might be seeing a problem where it was the middle pins at one end and the outer pins at the other)

The phone works plugged into the same microfilter, so 2 and 5 must be working.

I just went there and tried my BT Home Hub 2, with my splitter and my leads. Exactly the same. The moment I disconnected wire 3 in the socket, there was an audible click from the router and the yellow light stopped blinking. The phone still worked perfectly.

I just cannot understand it.

What I have managed to do now is trace the wires around the house. There are lots of them, going all over the place. It turns out the wire from outside eventually runs into a roof space where hanging in the air is a brown BT oval box where it divides out to two different parts of the house. I'm hoping to get that brown box replaced by an NTE5A.

ADSL is so weak here that everything has to done right for it to work. My house is slightly further, and I have a splitter built into the NTE5, so there is no house wiring involved whatever. Having also dug in my own 150m of high quality underground cable from the road I now get 0.75Mb fairly reliably.

diagrams and photos please.

Ordinarily you would start by disconnecting the ring wire at the master socket, as that's the one with the capacitor in that does the most harm.

Are you using an RJ11-RJ11 straight lead into a standard microfilter (what type) plugged into the phone socket ?

Thanks Yarwell. Here is the full list of cables and description.
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THE CABLES
Incoming cable from overhead to tiny white box. Only the two wires connected to the new cable, which goes outside again.

Cable comes back into roof to brown oval connecting box.
Two cables from brown box, one to upstairs extensions, one to downstairs.

Upstairs cable goes a long way including a trip outside to a normal socket in a bedroom, then a cable leaves that socket to go outside, a huge distance around the house and back in to another bedroom with a normal socket.

Downstairs cable goes to ancient black plastic connecting box.

Cable from black box to a normal socket next to it.
Cable from black box to a old fashioned master socket with capacitor.

Even worse - a plug in extension cable from a reel, from the old master socket around the room to the computer.
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COMMENTS
As you can see, an incredible mess. It took me about two hours just to work out what was going where.

Since there is no modern master socket on the incoming cable, before it all branches off, there is no way to test the incoming circuit to see if the broadband is OK. I may have managed to arrange a customer services engineer to come on Thursday to fit an NTE5A in the roof. We shall see.
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THE TEST AND ITS BAFFLING RESULT
I disconnected the extension reel and a phone, so nothing was plugged in to the old master socket. I also unplugged every phone and device in the house.

I took my own BT Home Hub 2 with its own RJ11 cable and its own microfilter, all known to work perfectly at three other places, and plugged this in to the old type master socket. The yellow light flashes, so it is trying to connect. (Don't worry that it doesn't connect, I'm hoping to sort this out using an NTE5A later - this house normally only gets 400kb and usually no connection at all at night. Recently it has stopped connecting at all. Putting in an NTE5A has worked brilliantly for another house a bit nearer the exchange, going from 400kb to 1800kb. ).

Then I opened the old master socket and removed wire 3. This should simply disconnect the ring wire throughout the house so old phones would not ring. I thought it might help as a temporary measure.

Instead the BT Home Hub 2 gives a little click and the yellow light goes out. This is the same behaviour as the old BT Voyager 220, which stops blinking and reports a status of "Down".

Now if I plug a phone into the same splitter, the phone works, with wire 3 connected or not.
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BAFFLED
I just cannot understand why the routers think the line is not connected if wire 3 is removed, when the phone works. I expect there may be every possible kind of errors in the wiring, but I can't come up with any scenario that explains why I can't disconnect wire 3 on the socket I am plugging in to.

I thought perhaps the incoming phone could be incorrectly on 3 and 5 at the old master socket instead of 2 and 5, but in that case disconnecting 3 would stop the phone working.

I know that ultimately I may need to open up all the connections and work out every wire, but I will wait until after the engineer comes on Thursday and fits the NTE5A. That will give me a sound starting point.

Okay we know where the cables go, but as each cable contains multiple coloured strands of wire, which ones are connected to which pins on which socket is the key here.

You have described a not untypical situation where people add phone sockets around a property. Personally if a socket was not needed I would be tracing back and removing that wiring, the joy of dect is what I call it.

The issue may be that if pin 3 is using a twisted pair along with pin 2 for example, this is helping cancel out local noise, removing 3 stops this and signal goes to nothing, i.e. at a guess someone has used untwisted cabling at some point in this layout. Hence why the colour of the wires used is important.

Remember the engineer who visits will only fit the master socket, any other work is likely to increase the cost of the visit massively.

I had a house with multiple cables going everywhere. When ADSL came along, ripped it all out and just left the Master Socket.

Then bought some DECT phones. All nice and simple!

Misco have a good offer at the moment- 4 for a sniff under £50.

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item...

Unfortunately houses around here are 300+ years old and have massive stone walls filled with rubble. I have DECT phones and I had to install a repeater in the roof. Even so they don't work well everywhere in the house.

I also have wifi, and that will penetrate only one of these walls, not two. To make that work I have a cabled infrastructure with the master socket with built-in splitter connected to a router connected to a switch with 8 Cat5 cables running in a star. These have two more wifi routers attached, so using three different channels it gives coverage throughout, one can walk around with a laptop and it moves between routers automatically.

My neighbour who I am helping doesn't have any of that, I just need to get her ADSL working somehow.

Once the engineer installs the socket, I know I may have to trace every wire, at least the downstairs ones.
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Two questions
It is essential that I replace the old type master socket with a normal socket? In other words what happens if you have more than one socket generating the ring signal?

If I fail to get the engineer, shall I just get an NTE5A and install it myself in the roof? (Yes I know one shouldn't in theory. If you had heard my conversations with BT you would understand the level of frustration.)

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Dealing with BT
This is what this elderly lady was told. She doesn't understand much but tried hard with me coaching her. In the end I spoke to several BT people for her...
BT Phone faults: No fault, so we won't help. You need to ring sales.
BT Customer Service. We don't install master sockets except on new lines. Ring sales and ask for a new line. But we can do an extension socket.
BT Broadband faults. You can't have a Broadband accelerator because you don't have a modern master socket. We don't install master sockets. You are too far from the exchange anyway so what do you expect.
(It was BT Customer Service that finally gave in, only after insisting on speaking to a supervisor. But whether an engineer will actually come and do anything remains to be seen.)

Edited by Growltiger (Tue 09-Nov-10 12:27:05)