"dennis@home" wrote in message
web.com...
There is something wrong with the connection then.

Yes I was surprised that BT wired it that way, with all the house wiring
unfiltered. When we bought the house it still had an old GPO rectangular
lozenge junction box (the sort with a big screw in the centre) and the two
extensions (to a BT socket downstairs and to one upstairs) were in parallel.
ADSL ran over this (via the upstairs socket and a length of DIY extension
cable to the router) for several years and then we started getting
horrendous problems with the router losing sync periodically and failing to
see the carrier for several hours before resuming at full sync speed. These
failures seemed to correlate with heavy rainfalls, which suggested water in
a joint somewhere. BT attended and couldn't reproduce the fault, but rewired
the lozenge box as a modern BT master socket with the extensions (presumably
still in parallel) via a removeable faceplate, such that for the first time
we could disconnect the house wiring for testing.

I'm glad that they didn't connect the extension wiring on the filtered side,
otherwise we'd have been forced to have the router close to the master
socket - or find a way of routing Cat 5 to the upstairs bedroom where we
wanted the router to be. And that would have meant drilling out through the
house wall, running the cable up the wall and in through the brickwork again
in the bedroom, or else running the cable up the living room wall (maybe in
the corner of the room) and then through the ceiling of the living room and
the floor of an adjacent bedroom, then along the skirting board and through
the internal wall to the room where we wanted it.

Given that there was existing wiring to the landing, and my existing DIY
wiring from there to the bedroom, I thought I'd try it. I can live with a
slight reduction in sync speed compared with that at the master socket on
the unfiltered side, given that the router can be located where I really
want it.

Apparently when you upgraded to VDSL, BT Openreach *used* to include
installing a "data socket" (an unfiltered extension) within x metres of the
master socket, for needs such as ours, as long as the ISP requested it. Ours
did, but then they changed their policy a few weeks earlier when BT
Openreach started to allow customer-installed routers rather than BT modem
and Ethernet input to router. So we just missed out :-( Even the BT
Openreach engineer didn't know about the change and was all set to do the
work until he checked with head office.

It should make no difference if you have a proper face plate and the
connections are correct.
On mine there is a filtered side and an unfiltered side. The house wiring
goes in the filtered side and the VDSL plugs in the unfiltered side. You
only put the house wiring in the unfiltered side if you want the VDSL on
one of the extension sockets. You want to avoid that if possible.

I find it better to extend the unfiltered port on the faceplate to the
router using cat5 cable rather than using the phone wiring.

See above about the hassle of installing Cat 5 from the master socket to the
bedroom where we wanted the router. :-(