Problem with home BT Line.

[speckytecky]

I have an ongoing problem with my BT home phone line. The internal wiring from when we moved here in 1998 is braided wire. Seemed to work fine for many a year. However, about a year ago loss of quality resulted in BT digging up the road and doing their thing. Six months ago there was an intermittent fault resulting in loss of signal.

 

Found that the signal was good in the test socket and this worked a while feeding to the two phones and ASDL – then that went off and BT called again – swapped pairs of wires in the road and all ok again.

 

Recently the loss of signal came back again and I found that unplugging the ASDL powering of the Broadband (Orange Livebox) removing the front plate of the BT box and then plugging it back in (carefully screwing the plate back on so that the left side was not as tight as the right side – fully tightening the left side resulting in no signal) then reconnecting the ASDL and switching on the Livebox restored things. But it kept happening! After much discussion with BT an engineer called and replaced the front plate (there is an I-Plate I fitted a while ago) the man from BT did comment on the fact that the braided wire could well be adding to the problem.

 

Today, inadvertently the power to the Livebox was switched off and when it was switched back on the BT signal had dropped off again only to be restored by unscrewing, taking out the BT faceplate and plugging it back in again.

 

As BT assure me it’s an internal problem I reckon I need to replace my braided wire with solid core wire (any suggestions where to buy) – or has anyone other useful suggestions please?

[synaesthesia]

Replace it with Cat5. You can also run network through the same cable if you wanted Cheap and cheerful, reliable and damned slight better quality than what BT will throw in. Did the same in a flat of mine to resolve a hissy line problem as BT refused liability and the landlord said tough. Made the world of difference and gave me a further 1000KBPs internet speed

[MatthewL]

Just a note there has been a national problem with ADSL this morning around 0944 most customers were disconnected for around 4 minutes and this affected all suppliers of ADSL as well.