Master Socket - Who's Responsibility?

macman

TT don't have any engineers. Was he from OR, or was he a 'Bright Sparks' 'engineer'? OR would be charging £130 for a call out.

securityguy

"When the Openreach engineer installed the socket around 2 years ago, I specifically asked him who's responsibility it was and he said it was theirs (Openreach) and the customer shouldn't interfere with it.
It came in one packet and my understanding is that it requires both sections to work as an effective unit,"

Either he was wrong or was unclear.

The portion of the master socket that is screwed to the wall is theirs, and you shouldn't interfere with it. However, it contains a BT-six socket, into which the face plate, which has a BT-six plug on the back, fits. The "demarc", the demarcation point between Openreach's cabling and yours, is at the BT-six socket in the fixed part of the NTE5 master socket. Openreach provided you with a face plate as a courtesy, and because it's neater that way, but it isn't their territory.

The face plate is not required for correct operation: it's just a plug and a punchdown block in a convenient form factor. The idea is that if you remove the faceplate, plug a phone into the internal socket and it works then the problem is in the house wiring, and, crucially for your problem, "house wiring" includes the face plate.

Older master sockets don't have a removable face plate, which meant that the official way to add any additional wiring was via a combined plug, socket and extension cable, which was ugly and unreliable.

You can see BT giving you permission to open it up here:

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/13892/

More details here:

https://www.claritybroadband.co.uk/telecoms/adsl_faceplate.htm

Sorry, but Talk Talk's advice was right: you should have just bought a new face plate.

Border_Reiver2

macman I made an appointment with TalkTalk and this "engineer" arrived at the appointed time and said he was from TalkTalk. He had no markings on his van & he was here for around 10 mins.

Border_Reiver2

securityguy Thanks, I've looked at your links and although I now know how to deal with such a problem in the future, I gather than the faceplate still belongs to BT and I only have "permission to open it". It's unclear whether I have permission to replace it with a different faceplate, although I wouldn't even have known what to ask for anyway.
I would still like to see a legal document that clearly lays down the responsibilities of each party. The BT video was helpful and the other document was produced by a third party (neither BT nor TalkTalk), so again is just opinion, even if it may be an informed opinion.
I'm fairly certain you are correct in this, but I still say that BT and all the broadband providers (not just TalkTalk) have a duty to ensure that the correct documentation (backed up by laws) is provided to the customers, so that there can be absolutely no doubt about where responsibility lies. I suspect though that they prefer to keep things vague.
TalkTalk people have always been inconsistent in what they have told me, so they really need to retrain their contact centre staff. As a customer, I find inconsistency in a company very frustrating.
As I previously said, I am inclined to pay their bill if I get one, but I'll be off to a better provider.
Thanks for your input though.

Retrogamer

Border_Reiver2 wrote: »

Retrogamer, you may well be correct in your interpretation of this, but there are those that disagree with you with equal certainty. If you could refer me to the documentation that you got your information from, I'll be happy to believe you.

I don't have any documentation. This is my advise from working with various ISP's over many years. Most of my time was diagnosing technical issues, liasing with engineers, booking them and dealing with the charges.

macman

Border_Reiver2 wrote: »

macman I made an appointment with TalkTalk and this "engineer" arrived at the appointed time and said he was from TalkTalk. He had no markings on his van & he was here for around 10 mins.

That was Bright Sparks then, hence the lower charge. And they are not in any meaningful sense of the word 'engineers'.

securityguy

"I gather than the faceplate still belongs to BT and I only have "permission to open it"."

You can replace it. Here's BT telling you about replacing the face plate of an NTE5:

http://www.shop.bt.com/content/uni2/documentation/58lt/iplate_8pp_booklet_v2_iplate_instruction_booklet.pdf

BT WHolesale would hardly provide instructions on how to do something BT said you couldn't do, would they?

There are endless threads like this on the BT Community Forums:

https://community.bt.com/t5/ADSL-Copper-Broadband-Speed/Replacing-NTE5-faceplate/td-p/1380705

Border_Reiver2

Thanks for all your advice folks. I have decided to switch to another ISP.
I have been in touch with TalkTalk to say that I intend switching & they offered to reduce my "repair" bill by £50 & give me a better deal. It's no longer about the money charged, I'll happily pay that to be rid of TalkTalk.
The actual broadband and phone service from TalkTalk have been excellent, with only infrequent glitches that were mostly in BT's cables outside.
My main problem with TalkTalk has been their contact centre. I have difficulty making out what the agents are saying, partly because of their accent and partly because of loud background noise. Even when I have told them that I had done all they required checks, they insisted that I listen to them go over their script, in fact they were sometimes quite rude Some of the information given to me by agents was contradicting what other agents had said.
Then there's the problem with the faceplate that started this thread off. Again, contradictory information from them. They stated with certainty that the faceplate was my responsibility, yet nowhere in the small print of the contract does it confirm that. Surely it wouldn't take much doing to cover this in the contract, then these situations could never occur. It would be interesting to see the outcome if someone could be bothered to take TalkTalk to court over this. Without any documentary evidence and agreement between ISP's and BT, I think the customer would win. I know who owns the boundaries of our house - because it's in the deeds (in writing and on a plan), a very simple way of everyone knowing exactly what's what. Maybe ISP's like to keep it vague.

Thanks again for all your help.

JJ_Egan

Its OpenReach that decide to charge or not on any job .

onomatopoeia99

JJ_Egan wrote: »

Its OpenReach that decide to charge or not on any job .

But the ISP that decides whether to charge the consumer or absorb any charge from OR.