Newbie help on wiring

Hi everyone, this is my first post and it could be a long one (sorry in advance), so any help will be greatly appreciated. I seem to have some noise on my line, which i think is being caused internally as an engineer has checked everything outside the house, and on occasions when I receive a call or make a call my internet cuts off.

My BT master socket is in the hall downstairs and my modem/router is connected via a standard telephone extension cable (it was installed when I bought the house) in an upstairs bedroom. I know ideally I should have the modem attached to the master socket but the wife is never going to let that happen, so it has to be upstairs.

Using the master socket on the front is an adaptor (is the only way I can describe it but it is not a microfilter) which has the sky telephone cable wired in and then a micro filter attached with the telephone plugged into it. Hard wired into the back of the master socket front panel is the telephone extension cable to upstairs. Reading around I thought this would only have two wires attached but it seems to have 6!!! wired as follows:

Connection 1: green wire with white banding
Connection 2: Blue wire with white banding
Connection 3: Orange wire with white banding
Connection 4: White wire with orange banding
Connection 5: White wire with blue banding
Connection 6: White wire with green banding.

I am planning to change the front plate of the master socket for one of these. That way I can do away with the microfilter on the front, as it has one built in for the front phone socket, and the sky adaptor, which I will hard wire into the back.

Now the questions as I am a little stuck, will what I have suggested so far work okay?
Secondly, should I be changing the current telephone extension wiring for Cat5e cable (will it improve anything), if I leave it as is for now does the current extension sound as though it is wired correctly?
If I do change the cable what face plate will I need for my extension socket upstairs, a network one or a telephone, will I still need a micro filter upstairs? I am very confused with the extension part.

Thank you again from a very confused person. Mods if this is in the wrong place please can you move it.

The existing cable being 'colour' and 'white and colour' pairs indicates it's some sort of twisted pair cable, which is what you want. It doesn't matter whether it's CW1308 (telephone cable) or Category 5/5e - it will do the same job.

Of the six wires, only three do anything - 2 and 5 are the line itself and 3 is the ring wire. Almost every phone you encounter today doesn't need the ring wire connected - but let's not get into the technicalities of the ring wire as yet.


From what you describe, the extension to the Sky box is unfiltered, which is not helping, not least because the sort of plug-in extension you describe often does not use twisted pair cable. Before doing anything else, change the order around: plug the filter into the master socket, the Sky extension into the filter, and the phone into the socket on the Sky extension. Has that helped with the disconnections when the phone is in use?


Rather than the filter you suggested, I'd use this one - it's a later redesign of the one you mentioned, and is the filter supplied by BT Openreach when installing FTTC. It goes in between the existing front and back parts of the NTE5 master. Before placing your order, check the existing screws holding on the front plate of the NTE5 - if they are fine thread pitch, you'll need longer machine screws (if you're not sure, order them anyway for the 20p they cost).

The existing three pair extension cable to upstairs has enough pairs to use a faceplate filter. All you'd need to do is pull 1 and 6 out of the existing faceplate, and move them to the 2 way IDC block on the filter I suggested - see the yellow arrow in the bottom right picture on this page for the location. You don't need to disconnect the other four wires - use the slot in the bottom of the filter to fit the new filter without disconnecting them.

At the bedroom end, replace the existing faceplate with an RJ11 and secondary phone faceplate. Connect the orange and blue pairs of wires to 2 to 5 on the phone module, using the colour code you posted. The green pair of wires go to the middle two positions (3 and 4) on the RJ11 module - it shouldn't matter which way round. You now have an RJ11 socket to connect your DSL equipment to and a phone socket, with no need to use any plug-in filters anywhere.

You will need an IDC tool to make the connections. The plastic ones are awful - it's well worth the money for the knock-off of the official Krone tool. On the proper or knock-off tools, there's a hook that swings out from the handle - use this to pull the 1 and 6 wires out of the existing faceplate and the wires out of the existing bedroom extension to prevent damaging the connection blocks.


A later enhancement is to replace the plug-in extension to the Sky box (which you can plug in to the faceplate to start with) with a hard-wired one. The cable in these plug-in extension kits tends to be of poor quality - I'd run new twisted pair cable (CW1308 phone cable or Category 5e - it doesn't matter which) to an IDC secondary phone faceplate (many options exist - this will do fine).

Think I wouldn't use an interstitial faceplate for that job if using two pairs of the existing extension. Rather I would prefer to use A&B and 2&5 terminals on a standard filtered faceplate such as the one the OP suggested using. The pairs connected separately to a bottom plate and an interstitial plate could make the job a little tricky and perhaps be somewhat vulnerable to disconnections if the plates are removed in the future - such as when accessing the test socket?

That is certainly a concern. It depends on the amount of slack available in the cable as to what is the best solution. So long as there's a reasonable amount of slack, the interstitial faceplate should work and the installation would then be ready for FTTC if the OP later upgraded.

There are strain relief shackles that allow cable ties to be fitter which might help, though they are usually ignored. Don't directly cable tie a single pair of wires - cable ties should only go round the outer jacket. A single pair may need an offcut of outer jacket or similar slipping round it to cushion it before fitting a cable tie.


If the OP decides to go for the modified ADSL faceplate filter he was originally looking at, the instructions I posted hold, save that all the wires need moving to the back of the new filter. 2, 3, 4 and 5 are the blue and orange pairs to the colour code he posted, whilst the green pair would go to A and B.

What's the OP doing about the sky box extension (?) - hardwiring to filtered voice? Does he even need it?

In the last paragraph of my first reply, I proposed plugging it into the new faceplate to start with, then replacing it with a hard wired extension later:

In reply to a post by David_W:

A later enhancement is to replace the plug-in extension to the Sky box (which you can plug in to the faceplate to start with) with a hard-wired one.

Wow you guys are amazing, thank you for the lengthy replies. I will go over in detail what you have suggested when i get home and see if I have any questions from it.

One that does crop up is regarding the upstair connection. The suggested front plate for upstairs says that it is unfiltered but you say that I won't need a filter with the modem plugging straight into the ADSL plug, is the filtering provided by the way it is wired downstairs??

Hard wiring the sky extension would indeed be a neat solution Haven't had the need for a sky box to be connected to the phone line in years - I did connect it a few times to order box office movies though, but because they were encrypted I couldn't record them to DVD

Do you actually need the sky box connected to the phone line?

In reply to a post by FlamesFan:

The suggested front plate for upstairs says that it is unfiltered but you say that I won't need a filter with the modem plugging straight into the ADSL plug, is the filtering provided by the way it is wired downstairs??

That's correct. The faceplate and interstitial filters provide centralised filtering. Everything connected to the phone socket or the terminals with numbers is already filtered, including the extension wiring itself.

If the NTE5 socket is a true master socket, with all extensions connected to its faceplate (check: does every extension socket go dead when you pull the faceplate out of the NTE5?), you don't need any plug-in filters after installing the faceplate or interstitial filter.


The only unfiltered connection is the pair to the RJ11 socket (block on the interstitial filter / A and B terminals on the faceplate filter), which you need for your ADSL modem or router.