BT where art thou?

For two years I sat with a constant 1.8mb connection. My neighbours enjoyed 3.5mb - 6mb. I was sold the riff raff that lines do not travel the same route to the exchange etc. and that there are many factors that affect line speed...I can tell you now that the biggest factor is poor BT implementation.

Recently my connection degraded to 900k. After having a steady speed for so long I was really put out and logged calls to my ISP and BT. Tests were inclonclusive and I was ready to move to a cable solution.

As a last gasp, I decided to have a look at the BT wiring where it came into my house. Low and behold, the wiring had not even been stripped of the plastic coating at the connectors... I removed all the wiring and started fresh. 15 minutes of work (child's play) got my adsl connection up to 5.5mb (After refresh).

This just goes to show that all the complicated re-wiring sites and all the hollow warnings about fiddling with BT wiring is waffle. If you take photos before you start there is literally nothing that can go wrong. As for being fined and disconnected from BT, I would like to know of this ever happening. For such an incompetent company it would really surprise me if they pursued these cases.

boostadsleasy

Are you talking about the hidden connections inside the backplate, or the wires to the back of the faceplate?

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Are you talking about the hidden connections inside the backplate, or the wires to the back of the faceplate?

Who cares, all questions like that are going to lead to is the regular fanboys bashing on how you are not allowed to touch BT wires because.... blah...... snooze.

The poster is happy and thats all what matters.

You don't strip the plastic coating.. it's an IDC connector. You use a punch tool to insert the wire in as is and it'll make a good connection.

It's possible there was a wiring fault on the extensions (plugging into the test socket would have found it in that case), but BT are generally pretty good at master sockets... it's beyond that you get problems.

BT engineers generally don't care as long as you're not stupid - I've moved my master socket and use cat5 where possible (better quality cable makes a difference to sync especially on adsl2+). The local engineer has seen it and beyond checking I'd stuck to their colour coding and not completely fluffed it he wasn't bothered.

Edited by TonyHoyle (Wed 23-Sep-09 12:15:29)

Screw connectors need the insulation stripped off, and you'd get nothing if it was that.

IDC jaws are designed to cut the insulation, and if it is those you are talking about then this implies your side of the demarkation point anyway.

It may be that just removing and reseating the wires properly with the correct IDC tool would have been enough.

WIthout seeing the line stats before and after it is hard to draw a conclusion

Blah snooze, but imagine the trouble we would be in if we were to support people in doing stuff to their wiring that they are not meant to do.

There was a small rectangular BT box (10cm x 5cm with IDC) that had an orange and a white cable connected to it and in turn had a blue and blue/white cable that went down to an NT5E box. The blue and blue/white did not have insulation stripped from it and it did not appear the IDC had cut through (very old).

I removed the small BT box and connected the incoming wires directly to a CAT5 cable and then to the NT5E box.

Previous to this change my Line Attenuation was 63db and after this it was 32db - the other stat I remember was 6db downstream SNR before the change and 9db after the change. The upload speeds stayed around the same but I can't remember the before and after SNR.

The bottom line is that my download speed is much improved and after years of suffering I wish I had done this sooner.

Sounds like the box may have been a RF2 filter. If your ISP had contacted Openreach they would have removed it of replaced it with a RF3 filter.

Edited by deleted (Wed 23-Sep-09 13:30:53)

Still not great 32dB attenuation even with a 9db target margin should be good for 8 meg sync
How has the wiring being joined to the CAT5? You using a twisted pair from the cat5?

If you have an engineer callout in the future the config sounds likely to attract a normalisation charge.

Or a junction box to join two wires together