NTE5B faceplate?

I'm not 100% sure if this is the right sub-forum for this query, so feel free to move if so.

I live in a village in Co. Tyrone, Northern Ireland & I'm currently a (recently new) subscriber to Fibrus' network. prior to this I had FTTP with Aquiss (via Openreach). Prior to getting FTTP installed with Aquiss I was a Zen FTTC customer. Ever since I went over to FTTP delivery, the NTE5 outlet socket has been lying alone on its own, doing nothing.

As it stands, I'm looking to repaint the living room & the NTE5 outlet sticks out like a thumb - it is on the inside of an external wall with no power sockets next to it (in ADSL & FTTC days, a cheap Cat5e cable was used to take a wire pair to the modem next to a nearby power socket). The copper pair of wires from Openreach's end that goes to the NTE5 demarcation point is an armoured cable which I presume was buried under my garden/driveway during construction, indeed when Openreach originally went to look at installing fibre to the home, they took one look and went "nope", resorting to installing a new fibre line from a nearby telephone pole.

To get to the point, I'm wondering if it is possible to get an NTE5B consumer faceplate from anywhere? For those not familiar, it's the name I've seen given to a faceplate that looks like the NTE5A but has no external socket to plug a phone into. I've seen this referred to in several places but I've tried looking everywhere to buy one but to no avail. Failing this, considering that the copper pair line is very unlikely to ever be used again, is there any danger in simply taking off the full NTE5 socket, unhooking the two wires from Openreach's end at the demarcation point, covering the two separate wire ends in insulation or kapton tape, and just replacing it all with a (coloured) blank faceplate? Using a corded phone there still is a dial tone coming to the socket, because of that I'm not sure if that would be an indicator to Openreach's workers at the local exchange for anything?

Thanks in advance.

The dial tone you hear is ‘soft’ dial tone, it’s present, but does nowt.

I’m guessing that the move to full fibre is underway over in NI too, so I’m gonna go put on a limb here, and suggest you just take it off and replace it with a blanking plate.

Any new voice service via Openreach will come via the FTTP line

In reply to a post by KordyMiles:

[...] Failing this, considering that the copper pair line is very unlikely to ever be used again, is there any danger in simply taking off the full NTE5 socket, unhooking the two wires from Openreach's end at the demarcation point, covering the two separate wire ends in insulation or kapton tape, and just replacing it all with a (coloured) blank faceplate? [...]

Technically speaking it's Openreach property and you shouldn't interfere with it, but in reality it is on course to be part of a defunct distribution technology (i.e. that of copper telephone wires).

If you were to do as you suggest above, carefully ensuring that there's no possibility of a short-circuit, then I'd say that'd be absoloutely fine - I don't think there's any way of detecting that you'd done such a thing at the exchange end, but besides in reality I don't think anyone at Openreach would really be fussed.

The thing that Openreach (and indeed any else) doesn't want is some idiotic house rewiring that would lead to mains electrical current flowing down the telephone line... but that's something that'd I'd think would be fairly hard to do by accident.

In reply to a post by binary:

I don't think there's any way of detecting that you'd done such a thing at the exchange end, but besides in reality I don't think anyone at Openreach would really be fussed.

However the NTE5 does contain an "out-of-service resistor" which provides a test facility for the network provider. With the NTE5 connected to the drop wire this allows the circuit to be checked for completeness without a phone or a modem actually being plugged in to the NTE5 faceplate or test socket. Since the OP has a dial tone, hence a live circuit, then perhaps if any problems did arise with the line then Openreach could become fussed.

If you have FTTP from Openreach and Fibrus then go to the outside wall opposite the phone socket and pull the wires out, cut the backbox out the wall if it's not a surface mount one, fill and sand down the surface, and then paint it. No need to keep an empty box around for a copper line that will never be used again.