Hi all, I hope you may be able to help. I am trying to assist my parents, which has turned out to be one of those jobs you wish you'd never started!
The situation goes like this. Their master socket (new type NTE5) is in the top corner of the house. From day one a filtered faceplate was fitted and the Sky modem/router was sited there. The line is quite long (attenuation of about 50dB) but the connection was approximately 6Mb and always reliable. There are three extension sockets in the house. The first is a double BT socket (this faceplate was installed by BT when a second line was activated, utilising the existing first extension socket after the master and its wiring by using another pair from the primary line's cable). The second line is no longer active, but the double socket remains. The inactive second line terminates here (I think that's irrelevant information, but I'll try to mention everything). The primary line then goes on to another extension in the downstairs hall, which finally goes to one last extension. There is just one DECT phone plugged into the downstairs hall extension and no other devices plugged in anywhere.
The issue they were having was poor wireless coverage due to the location of the router. Being on Sky makes things a little bit more tricky than they might otherwise be as Sky insist on their equipment being used (and, although there are ways to use your own, my theory is that if my parents run into trouble with the connection they can at least call Sky and go through troubleshooting without other equipment being part of the equation).
My thinking was that I would move the Sky router to the downstairs hall, where it would be in a more central location, thus improving wireless coverage.
Armed with a decent enough Draper punch down tool, I replaced the filtered faceplate on the master socket for the regular plate. I'm no BT engineer, but I'm competent enough with this I'd like to think. I connected up the Sky router with a micro filter downstairs and it sync'd fine, albeit at around 2.8Mb. I should also mention at this point that the ring wires are not connected in any of the extensions. Obviously this was quite a drop in connection rate, but I was inclined to leave it as long as it was stable, since their use of the connection is not particularly demanding.
However, unfortunately it did not remain stable, and the connection has been up and down ever since, sometimes not able to connect at all.
Last night I went to take another look and see if I could get to the bottom of it. The connection was back up and connected at 4Mb with a noise margin of 6.9dB (Sky's default, IIRC). The first thing I did was take the router up to the office, take off the faceplate, and remove the further extensions, so it was simply NTE5 to this socket. The connection was the same. This at least suggested that in all likelihood the issue is between the NTE5 and the first extension, whatever that may be.
Unfortunately, I was unable to get into the room where the NTE5 is situated. My first thought was I'd check the wires are properly punched into the terminals, though I'm certain they are. I also wondered whether it would be worth trying a different pair of cables internally between the NTE5 and the first extension.
Have I missed anything or is there anything else I can try? I'd love to get this resolved without having the move the router back upstairs!
Thanks in advance.
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Topic: Modem on extension is slow and unstable (Read 6231 times)