How exactly is a new line connected/rejoined in a house with no socket?

macman

Yes-fibre is faster. Fine for what? It depends what Gran wants to do with her broadband. For most people, your quoted speed is more than enough a tenth of that using ADSL and copper wires is more than adequate.
You can stream iPlayer etc quite easily on 3-4MBps.

Pincher

BT engineers, who are called Open Reach engineers these days, don't lift your floor boards, and re-decorate your rooms for you. They will not go into your loft and eaves space to pull cable, for "health and safety" reasons, but I suspect it's really to do with you demanding compensation if they step through the ceiling plasterboard. All they want to do is run everything on the surface, which means a lot of unsightly cable clips, which is not too bad if you have light coloured walls and white skirting boards: exactly what I don't have.

They do use a masonry drill bit to drill through the external wall, which causes a big chunk of brick/plaster to drop out where it emerges. I complain,and they send somebody who is clueless about building work and uses Polyfiller on the outside, and doesn't even bother to smooth it, because he is just an engineer, and certainly doesn't paint it to match the rest. I complain more, and eventually TWO managers turn up to see, and offered £100 compensation.

These days, they just bring a black four core copper cable into your house, to the first socket, called the Master socket, and any extension socket is your business. It is difficult to buy the black cable, because only professionals are supposed to handle it, so what are you doing with it? Well, I run it through sealed sections of floor and wall when I do refurbishment, so it emerges out front to the omni-box (aka drop box) where the supply is connected. On the inside, the cable emerges in a metal back box chased into the wall so the master socket ends up relatively flush.

The internal four core cable is white in colour, and goes from the master socket to other slave (aka secondary) sockets. You can do them in a daisy chain, or a star configuration.

Basically, I suffered in rage for years, looking at all these cable clips for four core phone cables, as well as the fatter cable TV co-ax running along the skirting board. We bought the current house after some private "developer" had redecorated, and every socket had been chased into the wall, as well as the switches. Then comes all these unsightly lumps, the surface mount phone sockets.

Finally, we did a whole house re-furbishment about five years ago, and there is pre-allocated positions for everything. When the installation engineer turns up, the wall box is already chased, and the cable is usually already pulled, unless I arranged a clear cable run that is hidden. They still use their own NTE5 master socket, which they can't screw up. My kitchen wall mounted phone has a hidden conduit behind it, which leads to the hidden extension socket and the power socket for the adapter, which has access by removing the drawers in the floor standing drawer unit.

By the way, never run signal cables next to mains cable, mains hum will drive you crazy. My builder will create one path and run all the mains cable and SPEAKER CABLEs together. I have tried shouting and bottom smacking, and they will do it again the next day.

The engineers will say these are totally unnecessary works, and that you barely notice the surface cable runs. They don't notice it because they DON'T LIVE HERE.

Conclusion? Go wireless from the Master socket, and twiddle your thumb until you redecorate.

Retrogamer

seriously wrote: »

Oh I see..

So they will somehow get a line into the house (underneath the door or something? How durable will it be? Won't it get damaged/soaked outside in bad weather?) and then just put up a socket. Why would there need to be a hole then (if there's nothing going through the walls etc)?

What's the difference between copper and fibre? Should I check/be aware in case I'm not getting the full service?

So many questions lol. Thanks for any advice!

Openreach engineers will "normally" only install the socket on an outside wall of the building so the only way it would normally be routed under a door or similar is if it was going to be placed beside one. Most of the time a small hole is drilled.

kwikbreaks

Pincher wrote: »

They do use a masonry drill bit to drill through the external wall, which causes a big chunk of brick/plaster to drop out where it emerges. I complain,and they send somebody who is clueless about building work and uses Polyfiller on the outside, and doesn't even bother to smooth it, because he is just an engineer, and certainly doesn't paint it to match the rest. I complain more, and eventually TWO managers turn up to see, and offered £100 compensation.

If it's still like that and you want to conceal it seach on eBay for a "Burst Brick" cover and stick that over the exit wound. Cost is minimal.

Pincher

kwikbreaks wrote: »

If it's still like that and you want to conceal it seach on eBay for a "Burst Brick" cover and stick that over the exit wound. Cost is minimal.

All water under the bridge, my builder has filled it in with external appropriate render/cement, and painted with white masonry paint when we re-painted. All very basic stuff.

Had a Virgin install last week. The external cables (four core phone and R6 co-ax) were buried by Cable and Wireless maybe 15 years ago, so I didn't question the need to replace them.

Apparently, a "Pre-approval" engineer had come days ago to examine the omni-box connections, and declared that they needed to be replaced, and a new TWIN cable (four core + co-ax, not the Sky shotgun) had been pulled to the pavement, but NOT the omni-box on the front of the house.

The "install team" that turned up was a pair of sub-contractors in a Virgin branded van. They had to leave because they can connect up the inside of the house up to the omni-box, but they WON'T GET PAID because they haven't tested the connection works. The only way they can do it is by running the new twin cable surface through the front garden, and they are happy to put in a green corrugated tube to weather proof it, which will be in plain view forever after. There is no way they can close the cap of the access hole on the pavement, which is cast iron and hinged, so the whole cable run down the road will be flooded eventually. They do have a riser COVER which will cover the hole they intended to drill through my front garden wall. As it sticks out, any shopping trolley and dogs passing by will eventually scrape it off and the cable exposed.

Needless to say, I refused, and wanted them to do it properly, like how it is already. They started talking about a "construction" team, and the first team left. The second team was not an internal install team, but they can only do the surface run non-sense exactly like the first team, On closer questioning, they confessed they are NOT the construction team. The manager now turns up, and tries to persuade me to have the easy option (for him).

A bright spark from the second team says, for the third time, why don't we test the existing cables. 15 minutes later, the manager came back to say the cables had been disconnected down the road, and there's NOTHING WRONG with the cables.

The first team starts work on the internal install, which goes very quick because everything was ready. All done in less than two hours. If they could have started from the appointment time, they would have finished four hours earlier.

Basically, if I had not stood my ground, there will now be a glaring green tube across my front garden, a riser cover that will be kicked off in the next six months, and potential signal problems for me and my neighbours due to flooding under the pavement.

seriously

Wow thanks for the replies guy, insightful stuff.

I've just come back from my grans and it seems (I wasn't there for the installation) the cables are pulled down from a telephone pole. They drilled a hole from the outside, through to our living room (!), as that's where the nearest mains are, so that's where the master socket/router are atm.

Luckily, because the whole of the outside is getting done up, I guess this solution is fine for us.

The router page is saying 67mb down and 19 upload, which is decent. I'm guessing once the line stabilises, it'll give us a bit more speed.

macman wrote: »

Yes-fibre is faster. Fine for what? It depends what Gran wants to do with her broadband. For most people, your quoted speed is more than enough a tenth of that using ADSL and copper wires is more than adequate.
You can stream iPlayer etc quite easily on 3-4MBps.

There will be other family in the house so the speed is for a couple of computers/laptops, ipads and internet tv-ing!

So er..how do I find out whether I got copper or fibre?

Also I still don't get the difference, so fibre is faster than copper even if they both offer e,g 67mbs speed?

littleboo

If you have 67Mb, then you have fibre to the cabinet and copper from the cab to the house. If you had a copper only connection (adsl) you'd be getting much lower speeds, depending on the distance to the exchange, a max of around 20Mb if you were close.

9_inch

Pretty sure they will have to drill a hole in the wall.

cajef

9_inch wrote: »

Pretty sure they will have to drill a hole in the wall.

Erm! did you read post #17 above?

seriously

^lol

littleboo wrote: »

If you have 67Mb, then you have fibre to the cabinet and copper from the cab to the house. If you had a copper only connection (adsl) you'd be getting much lower speeds, depending on the distance to the exchange, a max of around 20Mb if you were close.

Oh I get it now. It's deffo a fast connection at the moment. Let's see how it fares when the kids are on the Ipads streaming another mind-numbing play song.

Hopefully the cashback from TCB and the Sainsbury voucher they were offering come through.

Cheers guys.