Openreach responsibility

I am having problems working out where Openreach responsibility lies for a phone line.

A friend has his line coming into the house to an old style junction box where it is then split into 2, one going upstairs and one to the kitchen. He has a splitter on the upstairs socket, and another one on the socket in the kitchen. The router is then plugged into the splitter (in the kitchen)

My question is where does Openreach responsibility end, and customer responsibility start?

Is either of the two socket an NTE5, where the bottom half of the faceplate comes off If so, that is the master and the demarcation point is the test socket inside it.

If not, I'm not sure. I expect it will be the junction box or whichever of the two is the master. See the LJ 2/1A and LJ 2/3A on this page. The master has the cylindrical capacitor at the top. Similarly if the sockets are even older, as shown there as well.

If its still not clear, then likely they will consider the first junction box on the property the boundary.

http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/pricin...

Still applies, so £25+VAT to fit an NTE5, assuming engineer is on site to do something else already. Otherwise 'separate Visit Charge will also apply'

The junction box is like this one. This is the first box in the property. I will have to check the two "sockets" but I don't see how one or the other could be confirmed as a master

Edited by ukwiz (Thu 06-Feb-14 17:00:19)

How often is that charge actually applied if the engineer is there for other reasons? I had my drop wire replaced a couple of years ago due to a snap in one of the cores of the old style figure 8 cable, and was "upgraded" from one of the old GPO lozenge things to an NTE5 as part of fixing it without any charge.

Admittedly the fact there was a flush mounted back box in the wall with conduit through to the outside and a pull wire in may well have helped. Originally I had planned to pull the old figure 8 wire out feed it through the conduit and fit an pucker BT NTE5 left behind by a BT engineer from a HomeHighway to ADSL transition at another property some years earlier. However the drop cable failed before I got around to it.

One thing that gets me is given that genuine Openreach NTE5's are available to end users how do BT know whether the NTE5 is one they fitted or one someone else fitted? Even if they have records surely they don't claim that their record keeping is 100% accurate now do they?

Why do you care?

My house was star wired as you describe. One of the sockets was a master. When BT came to fix a fault on the wire to the non master socket, I settled for a modern master socket which BT installed where the junction box was, and a length of cable which I installed to replace the faulty one. I was not charged.

I originally paid for the extension socket, and for a long time it appeared as a no charge item on my BT phone bill.

How often? No idea, but not very often, as installing one is standard for an engineer based FTTC install if it is not present.

I think the only time charges tend to be raised if there were there for some other work, is if people start to insist on extensions being sorted out too, i.e. fitting the NTE5 makes it easier for testing so engineers can just install one to make life easier.

In terms of records, the penalty probably will only arise if you do daft things like tie the wiring together or break the drop wire to your property, or do something that sends mains back down the network. Given the state of wiring I've seen in some homes I would say this is not impossible.

Lots of ex-BT engineers who got made redundant who make a living selling wiring services and can probably do the job so well that no-one would no.