Intermittent broadband and unusual phone line setup

Hi all

I wonder if anyone can help me make sense of our phone line setup which has me rather baffled.

I'm currently experiencing a low speed and intermittent broadband connection. This caused me to examine our telephone wiring for the first time since moving into this house (around 6 months ago) and what I've discovered is rather odd.

There are two drop cables entering the house, both attached to a pylon on the other side of the road. One of the cables is grey, the other is black.

The black cable enters the house through the front bedroom wall. The bedroom has a BT branded NTE5 master socket on the wall, but the cable is not wired into the socket. It's just an empty NTE5 box. The cable sticks out the inside wall and is not connected to anything (link to photo below).

The grey drop cable is more difficult to follow as it buries itself into the wall about level with the first floor floorboards. I believe it then goes to an old style junction box in the porch, which then feeds a socket in the hallway (old "T in a circle" branded LJ3/1A). We also have an extension at the rear of the house. I have no idea the route the wire takes to reach this, but it's either through the walls or under the floor.

Currently our phone and router are connected to the socket in the hallway and it's worked well until the past few weeks when we first experienced connection dropouts. The phone continues to work.

My question is, why do we have two drop cables entering the house? Other houses served by the same pylon appear to have a single black cable. Could it be that the house had a second phone line at some point, or that the old cable just wasn't removed when the new one was installed?

Is it feasible that both drop cables carry the same signal to our house? If so would it be sensible for me to wire the black cable into the empty NTE5 socket and try connecting our equipment to that, thereby modernising our setup and eliminating any dodgy old wiring?

Here are some photos:
NTE5 socket and (disconnected) cable in front bedroom
Junction box in porch which I assume is attached to the grey drop cable
Socket in hallway

I'd really appreciate anyone else's thoughts on this.

Thanks.

Edited by deleted (Wed 06-Mar-13 20:27:58)

The second dropwire will almost certainly be another line that is no longer used. It will be both pointless to connet it inside the NTE - you will be breaking the law and also, you probably do not know what you are doing.

Whoever put those tags on the wire obviously had no understanding either!


Is that socket you are showing the "master" or extension? It is technically a master, but as you have an extension, where is it wired from? It should be wired from the master and not T'd off before.

The socket in the photo is the master. There is an extension but as you say it clearly doesn't come off the master, so I can only assume it branches off beforehand.

Thanks for the advice the NTE5. I'll leave it as is.

The reason why your house has two wires will be that the initial drop wire 3 (the grey one) is single pair only. When the 2nd line was installed, there was no spare capacity in the dropwire to provide both through it.

Dont like the sound of extension wiring you can't find the ends of. Clearly not teed in the pictured junction box, unless it is hidden directly in the wall behind. Any chance of another photo with the lid off the junction box ?

Ok, here is the junction box with lid removed:

Open junction box

So it looks like the cable that loops around the top of the box would run through/under the walls to the extension at the rear of the house. Everywhere I've read suggests extensions should be wired into the master socket, so could this be the source of our problems?

I should probably mention that we don't need the extension. I would be very happy to lose it in favour of a straightforward set up.

Remove the extension at the junction would be the ideal solution. However, as it is before the master you should not do it yourself but get BT to do it.

Even if the extension is unused and unfiltered and thus unterminated it can cause problems on the VDSL side. Somewhere I have a copy of a paper of use of a JDSU to detect Bridge Taps and the effect it has on the VDSL signals by increasing noise and reducing bit loading - with the length of the tap effecting te frequency at which the issue occurs.

OK, I'll do just that. Thanks very much to you both for the advice.