Internal Wiring / Master socket ?

Apologies if this has been done to death. I'm in a new build property , and when the Homehub is connected to a standard socket via adsl filter my BB speed is around 0.78 Mbps at best ! But when I go through the internal socket in the master socket it's fine !
Would upgrading to Infinity remedy this fault ? I understand its plumbed in via the master socket , or will I get the same with Infinity until I remedy whatever internal wiring issue I have
Any help or suggestions would be gratefully appreciated
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It sounds like your internal wiring is the cause of all your problems as has already been posted you should only have wires connected to terminals 2 & 5 no other connections should be made it sound like you need all over your internal wiring reconnecting correctly it may need a local telecoms engineer to look at it for you Openreach would charge at least £130.00
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Crackling Phone Line - BT Say It's Internal Wiring...

I am pretty peeved with BT at the moment, to say the least, with two problems which I'm sure have to be related in some way. Firstly, for some time now our phone line has become more and more crackly, sometimes to the point where it is so noisy that the person at the other end can't be heard. I have reported it twice to BT recently as a fault (with a 20 minute hold each time) and each time the person in the call centre in India (presumably?) has tested the line and assured me that there is no line fault, so any fault which exists must be internal, therefore giving them the right to charge £99 for an Engineer's visit. That kind of highway robbery puts **bleep** Turpin to shame! We have not touched any of the internal wiring or sockets or fitted any new equipment before or after the crackling started so it's hard to see how it can be an internal fault. To confuse things further, when we disconnect our router (which is plugged into the master socket via a filtered faceplate) the crackling stops! Now our broadband speed has never been brilliant, but before the crackling we could achieve 3Mbps reasonably consistently, with pretty good stability. Since the crackling however, we are often down at a pitiful 300kbps with frequent dropouts, so now we have poor telephony and poor broadband. This is supposed to be the 21st century, but you wouldn't think so. My call centre friends are adamant there is no line fault but I just can't see how it could be anything else? Is there any way that I can bypass the call centre system and get this investigated properly, efficiently and fairly? I've seen some broadly similar posts which seem to have resulted in a satisfactory resolution, and that is all that I am looking to achieve, without any more stress or grey hairs! Please help!!

Have you tried a known working corded telephone in the test point of your main socket as shown here.
When the call centre run a line test it very rarely can detect a noisy line fault.
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Help needed please for master socket wiring

I am renovating a house built in the 1970's which I shall be moving into shortly.
My electrician has put in telephone sockets in two of the bedrooms but when he came to the master socket he found the builders had by mistake cut the wire too short so he could not make a connection.
The master socket is in the hall low down on the wall and it looks as if the wire comes into the house underground.
I have spent hours on the telephone trying to get the right person to speak to at BT who tells me I need to contact Open Reach as it is damage and when I eventually found a number to ring them they tell me it is BT's problem.
In exasperation I telephoned the moving house line as none of the press button numbers seemed relevant.
I just want a BT person to come and have a look to see what to do but they have told me that I need to give them a date for when I move and they will come and look then. However, I need the builders to fill in the large hole in where the wire comes into the house so I can have a floor laid.
Any help would be so much appreciated

Hi Kh,
Thank you for your post and welcome to the forum. If you would like a BT Engineer to go out and take a look at your line this can bee arranged when you place an order to activate the service. With the line being damaged by the builder, there will be a charge of around £127.99 to activate the service.
If you need any help placing your order to activate the service, please drop me an email with any BT account details, along with the address details for you new property. My email address is [email protected]
Thanks
Paddy
BTCare Community Mod
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DO I need to connect to my Master Socket?

In short, my question is ... does my home hub have to be connected to the master phone socket?
I am looking to take on BT phone, broadband and TV package but my master socket is in my kitchen. The house is 10 years old and from that master socket the builder installed other BT phone points throughout the house. Can I have the home hub connected to my livingroom socket which is obviously not the master socket but a "spur" from the master socket?
I don't fancy having the hub in my kitchen.
Thanks.

You can have the master socket moved - so Openreach engineer will do some "messing about" with your cabling and make a different socket your master.
Or you can have a data cable run from the existing master socket to a more suitable location - this is a handy option if you're unsure of the quality of your internal wiring.

Two lines in use, one master socket that is bypass...

I work at an organisation that has a subscription for two lines. One line is used for the main phone system of the business and the other is used for two purposes: 1. There is a payphone for guests on it; 2. The business internet connection comes through it (DSL). The internet connection is noticably slower than it should be and often drops out, so I've had a look at the wiring of the phone lines.
Both lines come into the building from the pole through a single 4-core black drop-cable, as is quite normal I think. This cable comes into the back of an NTE5 master socket. The wire colours are Green, White, Orange and Black. None of these connect to any part of the master socket - neither the main panel, nor the removable front plate. Instead, they are all connected with the little translucent crimp-type things to the wires of the internal "extension" cables. My first quesion is, is this correct? I think it's incorrect, especially as one pair of wires immediately gets split off to 2 extensions, as I'll now describe...
From the master socket there are two "extension" cables. One goes directly to what I think is a normal extension socket (smaller than an NTE5, but it does have some kind of inductor or capacitor, and it looks modern). This socket's pins 2 and 5 are wired directly from the orange and white wires respectively in the drop wire. To this socket, the ADSL modem is connected and nothing else.
The other extension cable goes off somewhere else. However, it must be carrying two phone lines - because the payphone must come off it (which shares the line with the modem), as must the main phone system. It is a 6-core round white cable. Its Orange and White/orange wires are connected to White and Orange in the drop cable (i.e. the same pair that goes to the modem extension) and its Green and White/green wires are connected to Green and Black in the drop-cable. I haven't been able to trace this cable yet, but all I know is that it must end up splitting off to the pay phone and the main phone system, because they are separate lines.
So, is the incoming line not terminated correctly, in that it doesn't connect at all to the master socket and the one pair of wires immediately splits off to two extensions? Could this be causing the internet connection problems?
Any help would be greatly appreciated - preferably from one of you former BT men ;-) I'm trained in electronics myself, so answer technically if you want.

Yes, the payphone has a filter.
Yes I agree that the line the main phone system comes off may not need a master socket for whatever reason (i.e. it may have its own circuitry).
But as for the broadband line - it splits off to the payphone extension and to the modem extension as soon as it leaves the drop wire, which seems wrong to me. As far as I understand, one of the purposes of the master socket is to be able to detach the front plate in order to isolate the consumer's extensions from BT's line; but with the extensions being hard-wired in, that's imposisble. And with no master socket, I assume that whatever circuitry is normally in a master socket isn't present on the line. Does this matter? Is it just surge protection, or is there some kind of filtering as well? We will of course contact BT about this, but I'd like to know first whether there really is something wrong.

Using master socket to test Home Hub 2

I've been having problems with my broadband dropping out. I've tried 5 different ADSL filters so have now decided to test the hub using the master socket. I'm not wireless. My question is do I need to also connect the ethernet cable to the hub whilst testing or is it just the power and broadband cables? Thanks

Thanks for your help. I don't think the lead is going to reach my master socket from my pc so I suppose there's no other way of testing it.
Does anyone have the following problem:
When my connection drops, the only way I can keep it going is by making a phone call! I just dial 1471 and leave the line open. Not very satisfactory but at least it works lol.
I don't have any other electrical items in the room except the printer, I use a simple extension socket that seems ok and I've changed the ADSL filter - have tried 5 - and I'm now thinking of calling out an engineer but don't want to incur the £129.99 fee before I've completely eliminated internal wiring problems and thought that by doing the test it would tell me if my wiring was the problem and not something outside.

Internal wiring Problems ??

I have been checking out a friends Broadband Problem for him. He has just moved into a brand new house with new broadband and new internal wiring to 9 outlets around the house.
At master socket with all internal wiring Disconnected - he can achieve 5.5Mb/s at all times of the day - this is better than he had hoped based on his location and distance from exchange. BT engineer quite rightly says problem with internal wiring. Once frontplate is reconnected on NTE5 then speed drops to 2.35Mb/s ie less than half.
I have noticed that the electrician has fitted modular master sockets rather than secondary sockets at each of the internal locations. ie MK K5820 instead of K5821.
My question is - is this a possible cause of loss of speed when internal wiring is connected ??

seniorshot wrote:
Thankyou John for your prompt reply.
I am aware of the "ring" wire and had already removed that at the master socket front plate. (I am a retired BT engineer).
What I was hoping to find was someone out there who had experienced a problem after incorrectly fitting master sockets at extension locations rather than secondary sockets.
Would this cause a line speed degredation similar to my friends..???? The result of fitting master sockets at the nine extension locations would have the effect of having 9 surge protectors and 9 capacitor/470Kohm resistors across the line. Could this affect the ADSL signal.?
I would like to be able to say with confidence to the original electrician who wired these sockets up, that his mistake is causing this substantial loss in broadband speed.
More likely poor quality cable degrading the signal, and that is a lot of extensions and wiring.
There should really be a filtered ADSL faceplate on the master socket to isolate the extensions.
And the home hub should be plugged into the front of the filtered faceplate.
At least then, you stand a chance of better performance.
Filtered faceplate
There are some useful help pages here, for BT Broadband customers only, on my personal website.
BT Broadband customers - help with broadband, WiFi, networking, e-mail and phones.

BT Infinity / Master Socket

Hi,
Last week I had BT Infinity installed, but having done some reading around I'm slightly concerned by the work that was (not) done, and thought I'd post this for some advice.
I used to have an ADSL Nation NTE5 faceplate, from which I had wired a telephone extension. I also had my ADSL router connected via a 5m (or so) RJ11 extension cable, as my master socket is nowhere near a power socket.
While the installer was there, I asked about moving the master socket but he indicated that I'd have to pay BT to have this done (though he actually recommended I look for a local contractor who could do it much cheaper). I've since heard that some rather more helpful installers have done this work as part of the job! Perhaps the fact that mine was the last of the day meant he just wanted to get away early...
In the end, he reused my RJ11 extension cable to connect my BT Openreach modem to the master socket, but I'm concerned that this isn't a good idea and should actually have been done using CAT5e? I asked about running an extension from the master socket to be able to connect the OR modem elsewhere in the house and he indicated that this is possible. Subsequent reading around suggests this isn't possible though, and you can only run telephone extensions from the new faceplate?
Does anyone have any advice? My ideal scenario would be to have the OR modem in our utility room (used to be the garage), and to probably connect the Home Hub via powerline - or CAT5e - from somewhere more central in the house.
Thanks in advance - I'm more of a software guy, so this isn't my area of expertise!
Cheers
Nat
P.S. This all started because I've had a couple of dropped connections since the install, which could only be resolved by power cycling the OR modem.

The engineer should do either of these.
Move the nte5 to where you need it.
Do an nte5/ extension swap.
Run an internal data extension.
Run an external data extension.
If they say you have to have it at the point of entry then they are not being completely honest with you.
Perhaps it was a contractor/ mobile workforce chap and not an openreach engineer.

External Master Socket

Evening all,
Read some really useful posts on here and wanted to get some feedback from some guru's.
I have recently bought a new property and I am looking to setup broadband on a fibre level, sadly I have found that I couldn't find a master socket (which was weird) I searched only to find one outside my front door! (that I don't use ever) With my scope for Fibre in the ether I would like to ask would it be beneficial of me to get a BT engineer to come round and move the master socket from external to internal (my PC is effectively directly above where the socket is outside so couldn't see any troubles there)
What are your thoughts??
Thanks in advance for the feedback...

Hey, As far as i know all sockets are wired to the external, see pic attached. I know its not going to be free by any stretch of the imagination what i am asking is if i catagorically NEED and internal for fibre i may as well do it. Plus this will also give me better control for any config i am required to do.
If i do decide to do it what would the implications be for the rest of the ports in the house?

Cannot find BT master socket to test broadband

House is less than 18months old and had all phone sockets installed prior to moving in as first occupants. BT line connected after 2weeks. Engineer did not enter house. Now have problem with broadband and have been told I need to connect the router to the BT master socket for test purposes but cannot find one! All internal sockets are standard phone sockets.
BT line comes up from ground outside on front wall near door in a BT 'Openreach' box which is a flip-down, secured by a screw. On opening this the BTincoming connection is sealed, then there is a plug, which if removed disconnects the internal lines. Then there is a connector to which the blue/white/orange leads coming out from through wall from inside the house (white covered cable) are connected. The other side of this wall is underneath the built-in kitchen units and has no master socket anywhere.
Have been banging my head trying to explain to ISP that I cannot connect to a master socket as cant find one. Should I have one or is the outside box all I get? If so, how do I connect the computer to the (6 pin) socket outside?

New build properties are now being fitted with a new Network Terminating Equipment box, the XNTE, instead of the previous NTE5 master socket. This is fitted outside the property and BT responsibility ends at the XNTE. This is the box you referred to with the flip-down cover. It contains all the master socket components. The socket in the XNTE is a BT test point and requires a special plug - it is for BT use only.
In order to eliminate your internal wiring you would need to connect a standard slave socket at the XNTE in place of the white covered cable. Make a note of the way the existing cable is connected. The official connections are pin 2 - Blue, 3 - Brown, 4 - green, 5 - Orange.
See http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/networkinfo/developnetwork/downloads/Builders_Guide_3_1.pdf
Peter

No master socket

Hi
My house was built in the early 1970s and as far as I can tell has no master socket. The line comes into the loft from a pole, attaches to a small plastic box below the eves and a white cable is threaded into the loft through the brickwork. It then disappears through the loft insulation and somehome finds its way into two normal sockets within the house with no sign of a standard BT master socket.
Is this normal for the age of property and does anyone know how its resolved? I don't really need one right now but need to make wiring changes for a new socket and need to know where their bit ends and the internal wiring starts.
Any suggestions?
Solved!
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That sounds logical to me. All I really know is that BT like to have their master socket located as their external cable enters the property. Essentially, on their cable. If it is not then they can pass any problem onto you.
From what you have explained there does not seem any reason why it cannot be done. The only problem you may have is BT like to install only their master socket by only their technicians. This is the way it has become since BT sold off OpenReach. If it has been installed by them then they take responsibility for the fault. If it has been installed by someone else, then it is your responsibility.
The next thing that I will expect is BT will try to charge you for a new telephone installation. To be fair this is not BT but OpenReach that will charge this. I believe it is approaching around £200 to have this done.
If it is an old socket, it would be to BT's advantage to change the socket. However, they will probably be reluctant to do that unless their is a fault as they have to pay OpenReach to do it.Then if you report a fult then they will only replace the socket in its present location.
If the moderator is reading this he or she may be able to suggest something or pass you on the the correct people.
I am sorry about the doom and gloom but this is the way BT has become and what I am telling you is based on experience people I know have had.

Extra master socket ?

I upgraded to Infinity 2 last month.
My master socket was the old style without the removal front cover so I had originally used one of the 'doubl plugs' to connect to it and bring out the connection to a junction box which I then distributed around the house to sockets in every room.
When I got ADSL I removed all the unnecessary extra wiring and used a normal socket in my sitting room to connect to the router. I did tests and the difference in speed between connecting the router direct to the master socket and using WiFi was minimal and preferred the convenience of having it located near where the PC was normally.
A contractor did the Infinity 2 upgrade, I explained my wiring and suggested putting the master socket in the sitting room on the end of my wiring so the router would be near the PC and YouView box.
He fitted the new style master socket in the sitting room by desk as suggested but left the old master socket in circuit and claimed it would not affect the speed.
It was only after he left I realised that this meant I still had the horrible double adaptor in circuit so it was not hardwired all the way and the double adaptor is falling apart anyway.
I am wondering about just removing the old master socket and putting in another terminal block to connect the incoming pair to my internal wiring to the proper master socket.
Just kicking my self that I did not insist the contractor did a proper job!
MB

Can't see why your suggestion would not work. Just try it - if it doesn't work put it back as it was.
Mistakes and embarrasing goofs in e-mails are only discovered when you've sent them!

Internal wiring fault and bt visit.

Not sure what the best solution might be . I have an internal line fault. Mild noise on line ok for voice but wrecking my bb. Via the test socket all is well. However I'm due soon to have fibre on my exchange. I had wondered about waiting till then and if I order Inf2 bt will install a new filtered socket anyway on my master socket I suspect will cure the problem. (I have a the split style socket and micro-filters atm.) If I call Bt out for the fault before are they likely to fit a new master filter as their solution? Seems a waste of a call out fee if so.

imjolly wrote:
if the noise margin increases when you connected to the cleaner test socket connection then that is ok as that gives more scope for connection speed. as noise margin reduces to normal 6db you normally would see an increase in your conenction speed
sounds more likely a faulty faceplate ( don't go faulty often but do go faulty) or bad extension wiring
Prior to the original fault SN was 24/6-7 then I went to 11/10 for a week or so with DL speeds of 0.35Mb before I was irritated enough to run some CAT5E from the test socket to the PC. Initially after switching to the SN went to 24/5 and the DL to 6+Mb for a few days but post a 16hr power cut its been at 24/12 for 3 days and back to 4Mb. Hard to be sure what is causing what.

"Master socket or lack of"

Ok trying to trce the phone lines
black drop line comes into the house via a door frame somewhere near the bottom of the door frame on the iside a white cable exits and on the end of this after a pass under the floor the cable ends at what looks like a BT master - single piece like an extension , cap inside and BT trumpeter logo however nothing its connected to it. My partner seems to think there is an old GPO box in the door frame!
there is an extension box on the oter side of the wall from the incoming wire which has a further extension bodged into it and on the end is the BT home hub and Vision box the phone works off the home hub
is it worth getting an eingineer in to sort it out a the master has clearly been stuck on a patched wire and the whole thing has been bodged and patched by previous occupant
Broadband is down to 1.something to a max of 3Kbps as for phone we dont have any hard wired phones to check the line.
are we liable for any charges for getting it sorted or likley to be fined for the messing about with the drop wire?
Sean

seanlyon wrote:
OK further investigation black drop wire goes into the door frame and caught in behind the standard for the door is a small white junction box, from that emerges 2 white wires, one presumably goes to the small single piece master socket, the other goes to what looks like a cheap DIY shed extension box from which comes a further extension under the floors to where the BThub is plugged, As the hub hasnt been attached to a "master" (the extension has no capacitor or anything in it) will this be contributing to the braodband speed drop off and vision not working.
As i said in OP no phones connected to the sockets so cant really test the line with a handset.
whats the best way to configure the set up for best quality
Hi
The socket that you think is the master is it possible for you to plug the Home hub into that? ensure that there is nothing else plugged into the other sockets, goto www.speedtester.bt.com and run a speed test.
I know you say that you do not have a corded phone to test the line but to ensure that you do not have a noisy line which (would cause speed issues) can you not beg/steal or borrow one?
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Need help identifying my master socket for broadba...

Hi i am awaiting my line to go active for broadband but i just want to make sure the socket i am going to use is my master socket.
I can only find 1 socket in my house and it has a T logo in the bottom corner. This socket is on the bottom of my stairs (annoying place). I have opened it up and it looks like it has a capacitor on it. When i follow my wire coming out of the box it goes down a couple of steps and goes into another small box with a T logo on the front but all this has on it is a screw dot in the middle and another T logo.
So is the socket on stairs the master socket and if so what is this other box is it some sort of wiring centre?
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Ahh right so it is my master socket but it must be older than the picture above as mine takes the whole face off and not just the bottom section and it does not have any test point on it.
Would it be recommned to update my socket to a newer one? I ask this as i was looking into iplates to help boost my speed but there not conpatible with my current socket.
And i need to put a extention into my living room is it best to just plug it into my master socket or will i lose speed this way?

Internal Wiring / Master socket ?

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