NTE5 Interstitial Plate

Hello,

Picking up from this topic http://forums.thinkbroadband.com/general/f/4422024-w... I've now had a brand new, shiny NTE5 installed following confirmation of a loop fault. This has replaced a rather ancient looking BT connection box that was well past its sell-by date.
I now realise that I should have asked for an interstitial plate while the very helpful OR technician was there, and although it will only be an adsl connection in the short term, I am looking to upgrade to fttc soon.

Despite this the interstitial plate appears to be a good idea, even for adsl, and I've found them on sale at Amazon, OR branded, V3, for a bit less than £15.

My question is, are they legit, and is it OK to buy and fit one without compromising OR's rules and regs? (My provider is Talk Talk Business.) Any comments will be gratefully received.

The interstitial plates are designed to be fitted without breaking any or the OR rules, i.e. user self install once you have an NTE5 the original hope was that providers would supply them for free as part of a 'lets be nice and help improve your broadband' scheme.

On the legit side it is difficult to tell what has fell off a lorry and what is sourced properly, in theory Amazon gives you more recourse and checking for longevity of a supplier can help.

I believe they are (generally) genuine. Whether they are "legit" is another question, which applies to a huge number of items on websites.

Yes, you can fit them yourself within Openreach rules. Their design is such that you carefully remove the NTE5A, (that's the faceplate), plug the new bit into the test socket, and positioning any wires attached to the faceplate into the slot in the new filter plug the faceplate into the socket of the filter.

It comes with longer screws to replace the originals. Screw them in, not too tight, job done . This page shows how it all fits together, though starts from it already being there.

Bear in mind it disables broadband at all extension sockets. If you want to use an extension, which in broad terms is not recommended for FTTC, this can be achieved by doing a bit more work, that is also normally within the rules.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

On the legit side it is difficult to tell what has fell off a lorry and what is sourced properly,

Mine fell offf the back of a BT van after asking for one

In reply to a post by APTMAN:

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

On the legit side it is difficult to tell what has fell off a lorry and what is sourced properly,

Mine fell offf the back of a BT van after asking for one

They're cracking down on that because apparently too many are being given out for the wrong reasons, and they're not actually that cheap.

I found somebody selling Openreach MK3 Interstitial plates on eBay (brand new) for £6.40 inc postage. Seems to work fine. It allows for both filtered and an unfiltered extension id required.

As it's connected after the test socket it's all in the customer domain anyway, so it's not breaching any rules about interfering with BT wiring. Of course if it is faulty, then it's the customer problem but as it's removable in less than a minute, it's hardly a problem.

Hi Andrew,

Apologies for the delay in responding, it's been a very busy day. Thanks for the info, you've confirmed my thoughts that in many ways the the question of legitimacy is probably academic, as it's on the user side.

Cheers

Hi Robertos,

As per my response to Mr Saffron, apologies for the delay and thanks for your advice - much appreciated.

Edited by Mygri (Wed 14-Oct-15 18:26:11)

You were obviously a bit more enterprising than me...

Thanks for the source info, I'll check out ebay.

Cheers