Telephone wiring in a house in Edgware

I am sending a lot of images to a friend and therefore suggested that he should upgrade to FTTC as they took forever to download using ADSL. The ball was thrown back in my court with the response "get it organised and I'll have it".

The current telephone wiring is virtually untouched from the 1970s and is basically external wiring from the underground DP termination box on the outside wall to a junction box in the hallway. From there two internal cables run to the lounge and to the bedroom. Nowhere is their any kind of master socket but the sockets themselves allow a phone to be plugged in. External filters are on both extensions.

The smallest bedroom houses the computer terminal and it receives its ADSL with the modem installed in one bedroom with an Ethernet cable run to the other bedroom. Now my thoughts were to abandon all existing wiring and have a new master socket installed in the smallest bedroom when placing an order for the FTTC service. If there was going to be a charge for the new internal wiring then so be it. The plan was to have for the first time a telephone next to the computer with wireless extensions to the main bedroom and lounge.

An 80/20 FTTC service was ordered from Zen with the OR engineer only visiting the local cabinet. It was stated that Zen had no facilities to place an order with OR to carry out the wiring plan desired by me. Consequently following the service going live, the router replaces the original ADSL modem with the service continuing to be delivered to the computer via the original in-situ Cat5 cable. This is an unsatisfactory arrangement as it was desired to connect the printer directly to the router, quite apart from wishing to have no computer equipment in the main bedroom.

I have subsequently been able to relocated the router next to the computer by introducing a second hand BT modem and of course all existing phones have been ditched in favour of a triple wireless setup. But we are still left with an telephone installation with no master socket and internal poor wiring probably giving suboptimal broadband speeds.

A DIY activity could achieve what is desired but it is preferred to have an OR engineer to carry out this task. With Zen unable or unwilling to place an order with OR what are my options? Any OR engineers in the Edgware area want a little job for cash in hand?

You either spoke to someone clueless at Zen, or they are continuing their descent from being amongst the best to far from it. It is perfectly possible to order an engineer installation from Openreach, costing a bit more than the self-install you had. That would have resulted in a modern NTE5 and filter being fitted.

One of your two sockets will be a master. To see which you need to open them up and look for the cylindrical capacitor. See these pics.