Hi there, am wondering if anyone can give me some advice regarding a friends quite frankly archaic internal wiring that is causing a lot of ADSL dropouts. I know a fair bit about BT wiring, and am wondering how to proceed with getting BT to bring this up to date (hopefully FOC).
-The Line comes in on a standard underground feed with the normal grey outdoor junction box, this is on the neighbours front wall - there are a few normal looking cables coming out of this, apart from the line in question which is one of the old black coloured "twin" cables that looks like speaker wire. This goes round the front of the house and in through the door frame, into an internal junction box that its larger and thicker than normal with a single screw in the centre - I looked this up and it appears to be a VERY old GPO type that housed fuses for lightening protection. This box is covered in about 20 layers of paint and is impossible to open so for all we know it still houses fuses.
- Old thin white internal cable seems to run from the front door down into the cellar, draped past the electric board, and then vanishes into the wall on its way to the rear of the house and cannot be traced from there. The kitchen which is on the back of the house apparently used to have a BT phone socket on the wall, but the room has been drastically refurbished and all the wiring has been buried. I would imagine there is a junction box somewhere under the flooring where the rest of the house wiring is starred out from.
- there is a modern, flush mount socket in the kitchen which seems wired up using cat5, installed by builders. , a socket in the hall which is the "master" its like a larger older surface mounted socket, with no logo on the front at all. It has ring capacitor etc and again wiring is old brittle type. Out in the back garden an older grey GPO cable appears to come out of the bathroom window (? cannot be traced inside at all ?) and up the back of the house to an upstairs window into a GPO oval shaped box again painted over to the point that itll never open. From there more modern cable runs into the wall, there is a flush mounted socket the otherside of the room, and the same type in the next room, both look installed by builders.
Looking at the router stats - we can achieve 11 meg on adsl2+, attenuation is about 35db - which is suprisingly great, but it drops sync constantly, as in upto 10 times a day. Going down to adsl2 gets 8mb, and still drops sync. DLM has taken the SNRM upto 12db it seems, and its still dropping out. I have removed the ring wire from the master, and checked all the connections i can get to. A quiet line test seems fine, there are no clicks or pops etc.
Do you think BT would update this free seeing as there is no NTE so no demarcation point - infact there is not a single socket or box with a BT marking in the entire place! Substandard external cable, and star wiring. Perhaps the fault is on the internal wiring but we cant disconnect it to test.
All that is needed is a new feed from outside to the hall with a new NTE5. All the extensions could be dumped, they are not needed.
Sorry if this post is a tad long but i know details help!
Cheers
Owen