Home broadband - behold my ignorance!

[Quatermass]

My home broadband is a typical oldish setup - a BT Home Hub 4 on a bog standard 17Mb deal. The hub is connected via an RJ11 cable to a filter. The filter also feeds a phone via an ordinary phone plug; the filter itself then plugs into a normal master phone socket. BT are pushing fibre upgrades etc and have sent me a free Smart Hub 2. But the broadband socket on this is RJ45. Can I use the new hub by plugging in my old filter-to-hub RJ11 into it with an adapter, or is it useless to me until such time as I upgrade to fibre, get a new wall socket etc etc?

[Boredguy]

BT Fibre still uses the normal broadband socket, as it's only fibre to the cabinet, and then copper to your house.

You will get a new hub sent through by BT to plug in on change over date, but otherwise you don't have to change anything internally compared to what you have

[Quatermass]

Thanks, I get that what they're offering is actually FTTC, to those who want to pay for it. But I don't want that at the moment, and they've sent me a new hub anyway. My question is, is that hub currently any use to me? And how - if at all - would I connect it when my wall socket is a phone connector, and the filter plugged into that uses an RJ11 not an RJ45?

[Katy]

Thanks, I get that what they're offering is actually FTTC, to those who want to pay for it. But I don't want that at the moment, and they've sent me a new hub anyway. My question is, is that hub currently any use to me? And how - if at all - would I connect it when my wall socket is a phone connector, and the filter plugged into that uses an RJ11 not an RJ45?

 

This sounds really odd. My only experience of FTTC is at work but we use little Cisco routers with an RJ11 socket to connect to the FTTC phone line. So I guess maybe they have sent the hub for FTTP? Pretty sure that FTTP comes in as fibre then is converted to copper with RJ45 connection, then into the super hub.

[Boredguy]

You can plug an RJ11 into a RJ45 socket, don't think it's using pins 1, 2, 7 & 8

 

You should be able to use it on your existing adsl, it just won't give you any more speed than you currently get

Edited December 1, 2019 by Boredguy

[Quatermass]

You can plug an RJ11 into a RJ45 socket, don't think it's using pins 1, 2, 7 & 8

 

You should be able to use it on your existing adsl, it just won't give you any more speed than you currently get

 

Ah, right, that's what I wondered. I'm not expecting it to speed anything up - I just couldn't see how it would connect at all to my current filter without an RJ11/RJ45 adapter. So if one day I go "Yes! BT! I give in! Fibre me!" will they just give me a faster connection further up the chain and my ageing wall socket and ADSL filter will remain unchanged?

[Boredguy]

tbh your incoming line regardless of it being ADSL or FTTC still only uses the same 1 pair of cables, so yep they just change you over on the exchange to say "go via this profile now".

 

You can get BT to come and change your master socket so it has a built in filter, but it's still fine with the old 1980's style pre master socket and plug in filter

[MatthewL]

Do you have a DSL socket on the back of your new router, if so plug it in there. I initially plugged mine into WAN the other day and no joy, didn't even see the DSL one and first experience of actually having a FTTC circuit of my own.

 

Mine was a PlusNet router, I even think the BT engineer had left it like that and not properly tested it by but I didn't get there for hours after he had gone.

[Boredguy]

Well the Smart Hub 2 should have the lan ports in yellow on right hand side at the back of the router, and the DSL port is grey on the left just under the wifi details,

[Quatermass]

Well the Smart Hub 2 should have the lan ports in yellow on right hand side at the back of the router, and the DSL port is grey on the left just under the wifi details,

 

Indeed; the only difference is that on the HH4 it's an RJ11 and on the SH2 it's an RJ45