Broadband Related > Telephony Wiring + Equipment
Getting wiring normalised
displaced:
Hi,
My mum's just moved into somewhere new and is having a load of building work done. Sadly the work's nearly complete -- but the telephony wiring's a mess.
The house has no NTE5 -- just a junction box on the wall outside and 4 or 5 wires disappearing from there into the house. It's possible that some of them are for additional lines, but who knows without peering inside the box.
The builders have fitted a load more phone sockets and it looks like they've just hooked them up to the nearest wire. Who the heck knows.
By virtue of being close to the exchange, her ADSL service still syncs highly, and voice seems fine. But the modem's currently connected to one of the original sockets, so it'll be interesting to see when it's moved to its new location on one of the new sockets.
Ideally, she'd like an NTE5 in the hall, the modem on the wall there and the cordless phone base in the lounge on a filtered extension.
Of course, it's in everyone's best interest to get the wiring sorted out before the building work finishes -- but Sky (her ISP and voice provider) won't do anything unless there's a fault. BT aren't interested as she's not their customer, and Openreach can't be contacted by end-users.
I think I'll take a peer into the junction box when I'm down there next. I've got a probe that'll tell me which pairs are active without disconnecting anything, so perhaps I'll just try to figure out where the wires go.
Now, I'm no telephony engineer, but in the worst-case scenario, I'm pretty sure me sourcing and fitting an NTE5C would be preferable to the builders tapping whatever line they find with a dialtone...
Any tips on what to do next?
Cheers!
Chris
displaced:
Hmm. Read around a bit more - will see if I can find which socket is the current old-style master and run an NTE5 off that, if we don't have any luck getting it sorted properly via Openreach. Won't go messing with stuff too much.
Shame though -- it really could do with just being pulled out and re-done nicely.
ejs:
Adding an NTE5 will make no real difference if there's a load of star wiring branching off the line from the external junction box.
displaced:
True, true... I'm hoping at the very least I can figure out what's going where and make it tidy!
I've attached 3 pics of the internal wiring.
The most interesting one is 'wtf'. This is a loose board with what I think is an old-style master socket (please correct me if I'm wrong!). The black wire looks like something that's coming from the junction box on the outside of the house. The tangle of pairs somehow joins the black cable with the white one you can see emerging at the bottom. The white wire goes -- nowhere. It's been cut off.
'junction-box' shows ... a junction box! Apparently the builders severed one of the two cables coming from this, causing the main socket to lose tone. So, I think this definitely goes back to the junction box outside the front of the house... somehow. I'll see if I can chase it up through the loft. At least the house is a bungalow, so not too much verticality involved!
The last one, 'main-socket' is where everything's plugged in. This is all chased into the wall - absolutely no idea where it goes (other than, seemingly, via the junction box mentioned above). It looks decidedly un-BT-ish - dunno what's going on there...
Any thoughts appreciated!
[edit: oh, and to add: that 'wtf' photo isn't after any disassembly -- that's just what it's currently like!]
Cheers,
Chris
[attachment deleted by admin]
burakkucat:
That is just one big utter mess which deserves being stripped out and consigned to a rubbish heap. :o :-X
Start at the external junction box (if it's old, damaged and seen better days, replace it with a BT66) and identify the active pair on the service feed. Once that has been found, run your new lead-in (CW1308 specification cable) to where the NTE5 should be. Add a SSFP to the NTE5 and the essential work is done. ;)
With sanity now prevailing, one or more telephony extension sockets can be run, in daisy-chain mode, from the SSFP.
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