BT NTE5 Face plate

Been have a bit of bother with TT Broadband and am using the MT882 router connected to my PC via ethernet. The problems have been posted elsewhere here and boil down to dropping connections, although this hasn't been that much of a problem these last few days. and extreme variation in connection speeds - 0.4 to 2.2 Mb. TT Engineering have been on my case but have now gone quiet. One thing that was mentioned while I was dropping connection left right and etc. was to try using the test point behind the BT master socket faceplate. I tried this at the time but with no improvement with the connection reliability. Since then I have been monitoring closely and noted that sometimes when I reconnect the router shows the path as fast with the standard as ADSL2 and other times they are Interleave with RE-ADSL2 standard. Been browsing and the test point is referred to frequently. So today I've been testing some combinations of the following. Older RJ11 cable vs. a brand new one and with the microfilter plugged into either the front of the faceplate or into the test point. Have gone through these combinations several times and in summary I found no difference between the cables but for this afternoons tests every time i connected via the test point I get Fast/ADSL2 and for the front of the faceplate I get Interleaved/RE_ADSL2. The latter resulting in a 30% reduction in downstream and 50% reduction in upstream bandwidth. The actual speed compare with the speed tester from this Website albeit ~30% lower that my reported bandwidth.

So my question is does this mean that the faceplate for my master socket is a bit iffy and should I replace it with an ADSL type faceplate.

Does the faceplate have extension wiring connected to it ? This is generally the major culprit in causing problems.
A faceplate filter helps to eliminate the issues caused by extension wiring.

No other connections to the faceplate other than the on microfilter plugged into the front which carries the router connection and one telephone which in turn is a BT Studio job enabling wireless connection to 3 other phones. All I did was to unplug from the faceplate and plug into the test point - everything else remained the same.

So you kept the phone plugged into the filter when transferring the filter to the test socket?

Whether you did or you didn't, you should now try the opposite to get more of a handle on what is going on. I have a feeling it may turn out that your phones are a player in the ADSL circuit, despite the filter.

Would there be any advantage in plugging another filter into the phone socket on the first filter i.e.piggy backing the phone line?

You mean double filtering? No idea. But let's be a bit formal about this.

Hypothesis: The phones are the cause of poor ADSL performance.
Test: Disconnect and switch off phones entirely and try ADSL.

If the test shows that the hypothesis is valid, then it's worth thinking about double filtering.

One thing you can try with your MT882 is to force it to connect in g.dmt mode instead of ADSL2+. The default setting is multimode when it will choose which standard it wants. If you are having trouble with ADSL2+, g.dmt or ADSL1 is a better bet as TT cap their ADSL2+ to 8megs. That is also the top speed for g.dmt.

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for the front of the faceplate I get Interleaved/RE_ADSL2. The latter resulting in a 30% reduction in downstream and 50% reduction in upstream bandwidth

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In theory it's not RE-ADSL2 that's the issue, but instead it's excessive noise when using the faceplate that's causing the problem. The modem is trying to compensate for this by using interleave and RE-ADSL2.

Are you sure there are no wires connected to the back of the faceplate? In other words the faceplate is entirely free when you remove it?

Don't forget some un-scrupulous alarm / sky installers sometimes go direct into the incoming cable and don't terminate on the back of the master face plate. Might be worth an incoming wiring trace to overhead / whatever to check there aren't any other spurs you don't expect between your master socket and BT delivery.

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Don't forget some un-scrupulous alarm / sky installers sometimes go direct into the incoming cable and don't terminate on the back of the master face plate.

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Yes, but if that was the cause of the problem then using the test socket wouldn't make a significant difference. The evidence indicates that the problem is either caused by wiring coming off the back of the faceplate (that is therefore disconnected by removing the faceplate), or it's faulty connections in the faceplate itself.