Metropol

So, aware there are a fair few ex-BT types here.

My mother's house has shite broadband. I have attempted to test this by checking the connection through the test socket however the socket in the hall where the wires come in does not exist. It's not an NTE5, and it's not an old style one with the T logo, it's just a plain looking socket.

The house was built in about 1992 and there are a selection of extensions that run off that socket.

To add confusion to the mix, back in about 2001 we had a second line installer for the dial up internets. This was installed in the living room and DOES have an NTE5 socket on it. However said line is now gone and that socket just appears to act as an extravagant extension.

Now in an effort to try and solve mummy's broadband issues once and for all I am thinking of getting a proper master installed, however BT seem to want to screw her out of £130 for said visit.

As far as I am concerned this is BT's problem. The house was built for an electrician (also a prat - who decided to do all the internal wiring himself, and did it cheaply) however surely the line itself should have been installed by a proper BT engineer.

Based on the fact its not there, and based on the fact it wasn't swapped when the second line was installed, how can I go about getting it for free as I don't see why we should have to pay £130 to fix this.

Ideas?

I presume you've tried to ident it from this handy dandy guide?

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/tools/bt- ... ocket.html

Firstly, is it BT Broadband? I've recently set up a system for a guy and we had all sorts of problems initially. After some hours of discussions with India an Openreach engineer came out to check things. The master socket was of the old type, without an internal test socket, so he just changed it for a modern one and said they do that as standard for no charge if they've come out anyway.

Secondly, how competent are you with wiring sockets? Have you got an Inserter Wire Number 2A (Krone) tool? If so, I'd go for swapping the first socket on the line with the NTE5 off the other line. Only thing to be careful of though, is if the NTE5 really is now being used as an extension, then snip all the components out of the old fashioned master socket before you use it as an extension socket.

based on what you say, it does indeed sound to me like the wiring in the house is causing the problem - it is possible to disconnect the extensions from the old socket and see if the problem goes away?

i went around somebodies house once to look at their broadband which was slow and kept dropping and discovered that their extensions were wired with what appeared to be mains cable, it was a 1970s house i think and whilst i don't know what the exact cable fault was, plugging the filter into the internal master socket with the face plate removed solved the problem at the cost of disconnecting the extensions.

we've had line faults at work and bt have and out replaced the faceplate on older sockets as a matter of course, but i think that ended up being a chargeable visit because somebody physically cut the cable on the roof or outside the building somewhere. good luck getting it sorted, those sort of faults are infuriating.

The weird thing about the charges BT make for calling out an engineer to make changes is it's cheaper to do them yourself and risk getting fined later on.

I wanted to move my master socket, but didn't fancy paying for somebody to come and unscrew two terminals. I moved it myself with no problems. Later when I had a real fault (at the green cabinet), I saw that the charge made for damage to BT equipment is a mere £60. Not quite sure how a call out can cost more than a fine, but it didn't encourage me to do through bt next time.

Incidentally, when the openreach guy came, he was very pleasant and didn't even mention the fact that it had clearly been moved (I'd put it into a dual 1g dry lining box), just replaced my old master socket with an identical one with openreach branding on it.

Sorry to hijack the thread - I'm stuck on ADSL2 at the moment (until July, when Digital Region will free me from my woes) and I have a problem where packets of data just seem to go missing. This is less annoying when browsing (most browsers will just asking for packets of data until they have it), but it makes FTP more or less unusable as it'll just get nowhere.

The weird bit - the problem goes away whenever the router is restarted, then comes back over a 4-10 minute period. I've had O2 replace the router and the same thing seems to happen. Is it worth replacing the master socket or is this just a problematic router?