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[tickmike]

How Can Phones Ring Without a Bell Wire. ?. Mine do not 

I have a NTE5 V1 face plate with my modem plugged into the DSL socket, from the phone user terminals 2,3,5. runs around my ground floor feeding 16 extensions sockets (10 more upstairs when I do that  ) and also a feed to my out buildings/workshops.
I have done tests before and unplugged the face plate (disconnecting my wiring ) then plugged the modem into test socket with filter with no differences.

So why remove the bell wire when it's needed ?.

[kitz]

From the main site - The Ring Wire

What is the ring wire?

The "ringwire" or bell wire was traditionally used for pulse dialling systems to transmit the ringing tone to telephones when your phone rings.
Most modern phones use tone dialling and/or electronic ringers and therefore do not require this connection to be present, and will still ring if the ring wire is disconnected.

Why remove the ring wire?

Unfortunately, the ring wire can also act as an antenna, picking up interference from other electrical equipment in and around the house.

It is often found that disconnecting the ring wire improves the stability of a connection, sometimes considerably, especially on "star" wired telephone systems.

Read more: http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/socket.htm#ixzz3LdyOkW00

>>> So why remove the bell wire when it's needed ?.

You shouldnt need the bell wire at all...  even if you do have an old type phone

Adsl filters have their own capacitor, therefore taking the ring wire out of the loop still means that your phones will ring.

Read more: http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/socket.htm#ixzz3Le0z8r3s

[Ronski]

Kitz,  Some old phones will not ring without the bell wire.

Tickmike, but why so many extensions? Do you live in a huge mansion?

Are you aware you should only have a maximum ren value of 4 on a phone line, and each phone used to be rated at 1 ren. Although I'm not sure if this still applies these days. 

[kitz]

Kitz,  Some old phones will not ring without the bell wire.

If fitted with an adsl filter -  which has its own capacitor - should even the old pulse phones not work then.   
Surely all phones should have an adsl filter anyhow?

Same trick also works if you want to use a 56k type modem when the bell wire has been stripped - plug the 56k modem into the phone side of the filter. 

---
ETA

Just realised mike has an NTE faceplate so depends on if the extensions are coming from the front or back and are star or bus wired.   Shouldnt be that many phones around now that should have the problem, so if it was just the one phone I'd put in a filter rather than having one big massive ariel picking up noise.

Ive just had a search re the REN, obviously shouldnt be a problem with DECT extension phones, but yep it would seem the limit is still is REN4.

[Ronski]

When a Nte filtered face plate was installed on my brothers line, and the ringer wire was left out his old phone stopped ringing.

If Mike was using DECT phones he surely wouldn't need so many sockets.

[roseway]

If there is no ring wire then some old phones will fail to ring, because they depend on the additional connection to provide the ring tone. The solution is to use a plug-in filter on any such phones, because the plug-in filter incorporates a ring capacitor to provide the additional connection.

[HPsauce]

As noted by both Kitz and roseway above, a simple plug-in filter on the phone lead will almost always solve this.
I have a phone that requires the bell wire and it works fine with this addition.  8)
(And I DEFINITELY don't have any bell wires connected anywhere  )

[boost]

16 extensions?!

[tickmike]

Kitz,  Some old phones will not ring without the bell wire.

Tickmike, but why so many extensions? Do you live in a huge mansion?

Are you aware you should only have a maximum ren value of 4 on a phone line, and each phone used to be rated at 1 ren. Although I'm not sure if this still applies these days. 

16 extensions?!

10 more when I get around to fitting out upstairs  The joys of building your own mansion house .
They are there if needed  , but only two have normal phones plugged in and one DECT  phone with two phones.
While I'm building from scratch I can and have done, added extra things into the build, like Audio, TV, FM, LAN, Phone Sockets in each room (well not toilets or bath/shower/on-suites ), 13 amp sockets is another thing we are not short of, Like the hobby room I just finished it has 20 13A sockets in a 3x3.5M room, 4 phone, 8 LAN, 4 TV/FM, 4 Audio.

Next week I will do some more tests to see what if anything taking the bell wire out does.

[HPsauce]

How are the sockets wired up, is it a star arrangement or a daisy chain?

[Ronski]

Mike, I think you have a bit of OCD, that many sockets is so OTT.

There is simply no need for that many phone sockets in a normal sized house. I've virtually rebuilt our house and extended it. We have three phone sockets and one of them is now redundant. 20 power sockets in one small room and 8 lan sockets, I think you are just covering all possible places for things to be located.

I have a multiswitch in my loft which feeds countless TV/Sat/FM sockets around the house, but even these are becoming redundant,  as my server has a quad tuner for TV, and a lot of stuff is done by Internet such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and iplayer.

My current project can be seen here

 

[sevenlayermuddle]

We've nine phone extension sockets.   It's no mansion, just that the builder, like tickmike it seems, was feeling generous.

Once I'd fixed a few issues, I was able to get connection rates some way in excess of what was predicted for my ADSL1 attenuation, and also for distance from cabinet with VDSL.

The issues were...

1) Disconnecting the bell wire made a huge difference.   There wasn't any star wiring, just the sheer length of bell wire 'antenna', as it snaked all around the house, was obviously hugely detrimental.

2) One or two of the secondary sockets turned out to actually be masters, with ring cap's.   This is not major, and unlikely to have much bad effect, but fixing it can only help.

3) A biggie.. somewhere along the daisy chain, the pair had got swapped.   When combined with (2), this gives rise to a circuit whereby each wire of the pair connects via a capacitor to the common ring wire, and hence you have two cap's in series across the pair, horribly damping the circuit.    The effect was catastrophic, even dial-up modem wouldn't work sensibly, let alone ADSL!

[pedro492]

Mike, I think you have a bit of OCD, that many sockets is so OTT.

I was thinking OMG! For effort alone Mike deserves an OBE. No straining to reach a socket when he's an OAP!

[kitz]

Mike, I think you have a bit of OCD, that many sockets is so OTT.

There is simply no need for that many phone sockets in a normal sized house. I've virtually rebuilt our house and extended it. We have three phone sockets and one of them is now redundant. 20 power sockets in one small room and 8 lan sockets, I think you are just covering all possible places for things to be located.

I have a multiswitch in my loft which feeds countless TV/Sat/FM sockets around the house, but even these are becoming redundant,  as my server has a quad tuner for TV, and a lot of stuff is done by Internet such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and iplayer.

My current project can be seen here

Looking good ronski.  A lot of hard work time and effort gone into that but it should be lovely when its finished.

When its done please let us know - I'll bring the popcorn 

[boost]

On a serious note, is all that extra wire and termination healthy? Recipe for induced noise?

It slightly irritates me that I even have one active extension I will SIP everything when I get a chance with a standard corded handset for emergencies only!