To cut a long story short, I’m trying to determine if a simple wiring fault is causing the following (since Sunday pm), because I don’t fancy paying a wad of money to BT (£200!) or a sparky for something that takes 5 mins to fix:

– Broadband (ZEN) doesn’t work whatsoever
– Incoming calls are fine
– Outgoing calls are only possible if unless I connect a phone directly into the master/test socket, i.e. if I plug a phone into an extension it won’t dial out

Both BT and Zen say it’s an internal fault beyond the BT NTE5 socket, i.e. something wrong from the extension box onwards … so I thought I’d have a look myself.

After removing the outer NTE5 faceplate and the internal test/master socket, I’m left with the following wiring on the other side:

Blue/White – doesn’t connect to anything
White/Blue – doesn’t connect to anything
Orange/White – connected to A
White/Orange – naked end which makes me think it was connected to either B (which was slightly unscrewed as if to hint a wire had come loose) or E

NOTE: E is totally screwed down and nothing connects to it

The weird (and frustrating) thing is that I can’t find any relevant pics/diagrams on the web … and seeing as I work from home I need to get it fixed.

I’ve taken a slight gamble and attached White/Orange to B, and this has enabled me to make a couple of normal outgoing calls, albeit strangely the receiving phone (my mobile) didn’t ring?!?! And now I’m thinking of attaching a different colour to B … is that safe?

Does anyone have any pointers? Any ideas most appreciated.

Cheers
SM

BT socket

What does your broadband do if you connect it to the test socket with the faceplate off?
How is the extension wiring connected – this should be connected to the faceplate you took off. Blues should be connected to 5s and 2s as per the link above. Unless you’ve got old phones you can disconnect the oranges. They are redundant bell wires but their being connected can degrade your broadband connection speed.

There is no danger messing with the wires, if you short out the incoming pair of wires, the exchange just thinks the phone is off the hook. (Or faulty)

The orange/white wires can be connected to A and B in either order. E is earth and can be ignored. The orange/white will have fallen off when you opened the socket otherwise the phone wouldn’t have worked at all…stick this back on and you should be able to make and receive calls from the master socket. The fact your mobile didn’t ring is unrelated to your phone problems.

If everything works normally from the test socket then the fault is definitely on your internal wiring…then its a process of elimination. Unplug all your equipment from their extension sockets, if the fault is still there start disconnecting extensions from the back of the front plate, there is plenty of help online but basically its a process of eliminating the possibility of faulty equipment and extensions. Its not just a ‘dis’ (disconnection) you need to look for, also poor connection to terminals (give each wire a tug) loop faults where two wires are touching or shorting together.

To try and get the broadband working, try disconnecting all wires terminated to terminal 3 in each socket. (usually oranges as mentioned above but any wire could be used)