Dodgy phone wiring - is it worth fixing?

My house has some fairly dodgy looking phone wiring (which I haven't touched since I moved in) which has no master socket where the main bundle of wires enters the building. Instead, some wires go off (on a thin cable along the skirting board) to what looks like a master socket in the hall, while another pair of wires go off round the *outside* of the house to a phone socket upstairs!

Now this all looks a bit Heath Robinson to me, but despite all this I seem to have a reasonable connection on Be (attenuation 45 / 14, noise margin 6 / 5) which syncs at between 5100 - 6700kbps down and always around 1100 up. Strangely, my SNR halved when I moved from my old 2mb line to Be. It doesn't seem to make any difference to the line stats whether I plug my modem into the socket in the hall or the extension upstairs.

I'm about 1.4km (as the crow flies) from my exchange, so the attenuation seems fairly reasonable. So is it worth trying to fix my home wiring? I'd quite like to have a master socket fitted where the cable comes into the house, and then I can control the quality of the indoor extensions if I need some, but if it's not going to make much difference then it may be a waste of time...

Cheers!

How can you fix something which is not broken?

How do you know it is dodgy?

If it is working and you are happy with it - LEAVE IT ALONE! By messing around with something you know very little about you could well cuase yourself problems on the voice or data side of the wiring.

"Strangely, my SNR halved when I moved from my old 2mb line to Be. "

That's not strange at all. It's quite normal for the SNR to change with the line sync speed.

You won't notice any difference between the master socket and the extensions, unless you disconnect the extensions before you try the master socket. Then (and only then) will you know if there has been an improvement in line noise, which should exhibit itself in faster sync speeds. If you want BT to fit the new NTE5 for you, they will, but they will probably charge for it - talk to sales.

Ideally you want your master socket positioned where the cable comes into the house and your router plugged directly into this. That may help improve your downstream attenuation and increase your noise margin.

In reply to:

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If it is working and you are happy with it - LEAVE IT ALONE!

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I've got a mate who constantly urges me to try out Vista, I keep saying the above to him, but he refuses to get the message.

Well, try it out - on his machine and see how easily you can crash it and corrupt his install! Then remind him ...

Vista is a wonderful bit of software. It's WOW, I know, coz Bill Gates said so

Would I install it on my computers ? no way!

Was reported on another thread that some peripherals won't work with it either, especially if they are a few years old and use Direct Memory Access; apparently Vista doesn't allow this.
Also there are a lot of devices that don't have suitable updated drivers.

Agree, keep well away until they sort out all the bugs and problems.

Mike.

I'm not keen on the way XP looks. I always change it to "classic" look & feel.

I said that my mate, why install vista when I have XP set to classic with all the bells and whistles turned off so it looks like win98, if i get vista i'll just do the same so it looks like xp.