New phone connection - what do I get?

dander

Forgive me, I'm a total phone line dunce, but I wonder if anyone could explain how a new connection works.

I've currently got a virgin media cable line - 1 socket in the Living Room, one in the hall and a broadband socket in the study. I'm getting Sky in to install a new line - or at least they are sending BT Openreach to do it - will the new line connect to all my existing sockets, or do they need to put new sockets in? Does the price include just connecting up one socket and will they charge me extra to do them all?

Will they disconnect my cable connection completely so I'll be left without broadband for a few weeks while they slowly take over the line, or can I keep my Virgin connection until the Sky sockets start working.
Sorry if these are idiotic questions!

Heinz

Good news and bad news.

Openreach will install the new line onto ONE master socket. Within reason, the siting of that socket is up to you.

They will not disconnect (or even touch) any Virgin Media cables or sockets. The good news is you'll keep your VM sevices until such time as VM disconnect them.

The bad news is, if you want (need) additional sockets, you will have to try 'negotiating' privately with the Openreach engineer but don't be surprised if he sticks rigidly to the one socket specified on his job sheet.

dander

Thanks, that's really useful - more questions though...
Does the one socket have to be a single socket or do they do bigger ones? Reason being is I have the phone, the TV and a burglar alarm all of which need to connect to the phone line - at the moment there's a doubler thing stuck in the one in the LR taking the TV and phone and the alarm fits the one in the hall, but if they did such a thing as a triple socket, they could all go to one place and that should be ok - they're quite close together anyway.

The broadband would be more of a problem though - is that a phone socket as well? On my cable broadband I think they put in a different type of socket for that, but I could be wrong.

Heinz

dander wrote: »

Thanks, that's really useful - more questions though...
Does the one socket have to be a single socket or do they do bigger ones? Reason being is I have the phone, the TV and a burglar alarm all of which need to connect to the phone line - at the moment there's a doubler thing stuck in the one in the LR taking the TV and phone and the alarm fits the one in the hall, but if they did such a thing as a triple socket, they could all go to one place and that should be ok - they're quite close together anyway.

The broadband would be more of a problem though - is that a phone socket as well? On my cable broadband I think they put in a different type of socket for that, but I could be wrong.

A master socket is a single socket. You will have to use a triple adaptor if you want to plug three things in.

As to the broadband, yes, that needs to be a standard socket too (ideally the master socket),

dander

Thanks, looks like I'm going to have some serious thinking to do about how I can make this work!

macman

Just get an independent local telecoms engineer in to wire any extensions if you can't do them yourself (it's a very simple job, only two wires to connect). That will be around 30% of the price that BT would charge.
Your VM broadband will continue to work until you cancel the service-there's no connection between BT ADSL and VM's cable network.