Should a master socket have a dial tone

Browntoa

BT leave "soft" dial tone on their lines

osaddict

BT. What do you mean by soft dial tone Browntoa?

DaftyDuck

I know not of what I'm talking but, am I right in thinking that with Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC), an old-style corded phone with no power supply of its own won't work? Is this contributing to the problem?

I may well be wrong on the above....

osaddict

I haven't actually tried anything yet so it's not that something is going wrong (yet!). I was just being overly paranoid as I wanted to remove an extension socket. I wanted to test and say 'yes it works' then remove the socket and test again.

If i can't even test then I guess I'll go for my current plan of take a wire out of the extension socket, put insulation tape on it, repeat with the other wires, pull the cable from the extension socket to the master, coil it up. Job done.

Does anyone see an issue with my plan?

as far as I'm aware I'm not suppose to cut the extension cable in any way, as that could cause a problem.

snab

I know not of what I'm talking but, am I right in thinking that with Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC), an old-style corded phone with no power supply of its own won't work? Is this contributing to the problem?

I may well be wrong on the above....

You are wrong.

Your phone service still comes over the copper network from the exchange.
Your BB if you have a fibre package comes to the cabinet via fibre then from the cabinet to your house via copper.

It doesn't matter what type of phone you use unless its broken!

OP

If the line is live then you'll get DT at the test socket (faceplate removed) in the NTE. (unless there is a fault outside preventing service). If its not live then there's no DT.
If you have DT and then play about with your extensions and replace the faceplate and it doesn't work you have a problem inside the house stopping service. Most likely a short circuit somewhere if DT has disappeared.

On the provider front, decide who you want to go with then get in touch with them. You don't need a 'BT' line from BT to then take a contract with SKY. You need to phone SKY who will then deal with getting you a line to the house and charge you accordingly. That's unless you want to separate your phone and BB services.

Soft DT generally sounds the same but if you try and dial out then the line will cut off and not dial out. Not every line has soft DT. It depends when the line was stopped from the previous service and whether or not part of that line has been used to provide service/ resolve a fault for someone else.

HTH

osaddict

I've found out from my girlfriend that I can just let Sky take care of everything from that perspective.

What do you reckon to my plan for getting rid of this extension I don't want? - It's just an extension, I can tell it's not another master socket, or another BT socket or anything.

snab

osaddict wrote: »

I haven't actually tried anything yet so it's not that something is going wrong (yet!). I was just being overly paranoid as I wanted to remove an extension socket. I wanted to test and say 'yes it works' then remove the socket and test again.

If i can't even test then I guess I'll go for my current plan of take a wire out of the extension socket, put insulation tape on it, repeat with the other wires, pull the cable from the extension socket to the master, coil it up. Job done.

Does anyone see an issue with my plan?

as far as I'm aware I'm not suppose to cut the extension cable in any way, as that could cause a problem.

If its just the 1 extension you have then take off the faceplate at the NTE and pull wires out, snip end off wires to get rid of bare patches. Poke wire into hole or take cable out of box completely, replace faceplate.
Do what you like with the cable and extension box. That's yours, not Openreach or provider owned.
You haven't touched the Openreach owned bit if you only took the faceplate off (bottom half). So unless it was wired incorrectly in the first place everything should still work OK.

osaddict

I think there's at least 3, perhaps more, for now there's just one in the bedroom which is on a wall with nothing else that I want to get rid of.

snab

osaddict wrote: »

I think there's at least 3, perhaps more, for now there's just one in the bedroom which is on a wall with nothing else that I want to get rid of.

Have you checked for DT yet?
Have you had the faceplate off yet?
Have a look and see how many cables come into it.
If its 3 then each extension is wired separately and should be easy to dismantle.
If its 1 or 2 then your extensions are linked somewhere, that's a bit more difficult.

TBH if you are taking the extension off the wall, do that then snip the cable cleanly somewhere. 99% of the time you'll not come across any issues. If it does create a problem then you'll need to figure out how its fed and disconnect it from the faceplate to remove the fault.

osaddict

No to all three questions, I've not looked at the master socket just yet. I guess my coil up method, if I can pull it through, would mean I could mess with the master socket later if I needed to...