My broadband help site

A fair number of you have already seen my help site - www.robertos.me.uk.

It doesn't aim to be anything like as comprehensive technically as the Main Site here or places like Kitz and Samknows. In fact it contains several links to all three for deeper explanations.

What it is for is to give relative newcomers basic information, and perhaps aid the people here who try to help those with problems in the way I do. For example there is a page of useful links and if you have that open it is easy to include the one you want in a post. I am fed up of going into Favourites/Bookmarks >> right-clicking a link >> Properties then Copy.

For those who have been to the site before there are some significant additions - About page.

Nice site Robert, I like the bit about not refitting the ring line if you move home!! Disconnected ring lines have turned into a nice little earner for Openreach, but seriously this is the reason the I-Plate was dreamed up, so that you could take all your BB stuff with you and all would be well for the new resident.

Have another look . You may need to refresh that page if it hasn't changed as caching seems to affect the site heavily.

Lovely

Oh - and thanks for the compliment about it before .

Useful site.

While reading it, you mentioned the removal of the obsolete ring wire to improve speeds, and also the existence of the old Terminal 4 wire which isn't used at all. This makes me think that a typical BT landline contains two obsolete wires (ring wire, Terminal 4 wire). Couldn't these be used for a 2nd broadband connection, thus bundling 2 broadband links on the same landline?

Not quite like that.

The ring wire and T4 wire are from the extension cabling not the incoming cable from the exchange so nothing to do with what you are thinking of.

However I believe nearly all BT incoming cables contain two pairs. A single phone line only uses one pair so at the back of the master socket, probably hidden, will be the ends of the other pair.

That pair can be and is used for two different purposes, though obviously one of them not both concurrently.

One is if the first pair gets damaged but not seriously enough to damage the second pair. The engineer can connect you through the second pair without having to replace the whole incoming cable back to the next junction point.

The second is to provide a second landline, again without having to run a second main cable. This is a full second line however, with its own number and charges.

The second pair on the incoming would of course need to run all the way back to the exchange, there is nothing to say it is connected to anything useful beyond the drop wire into the house.

Just to fill in any gaps T4 was an earth connection used with some older private branch exchanges for recall of the operator. Its now obsolete.
Some residential lines did have an earth connection, this was used with shared service lines, or party lines where two subscribers shared the same exchange line and the earth connection was used to call the exchange for a dial tone and also to allow one line to call differant phones, which bell rung would depend on the phase relationship of the ringing supply with respect to earth. This is now also long obsolete, being replaced by DACS.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

The second pair on the incoming would of course need to run all the way back to the exchange, there is nothing to say it is connected to anything useful beyond the drop wire into the house.

True enough, but that could be fixed at the pole or cabinet in most cases. I was assuming it wasn't damage further back than that as that would be fixed before the pole/cabinet anyway so the second pair in the incoming wouldn't be relevant.