troubleshooting broadband on a bt line

[touareg_darren]

Hello All

i need some help from techie people "in the know"

my parents have recently set up sky broadband but the line has been really shaky. in the last 12 months it has only connected a few times.

sky say that all is good their end and eventually after spending 6 months trying to get bt to test, they say theirs is good too!

the problem is that the connection just doesnt want to "connect".

i have plugged the router straight into the master socket test plug and all is fine immediately and it stays connected until you disconnect.

but this then knocks out the phone lines arond the house and leaves a trail of cables in the kitchen which apart from being unsightly are dangerous.:ugh:

the bt internal wiring was totally redone about 5 years ago by a bt engineer with all new master socket, slaves and junction boxes.

how can a diyer check if there is a cabling issue without calling in bt?

bt want to charge £165 plus vat call out and then per hour, which is too much for a pensioner to pay out.:mad:

all the slave sockets work fine for voice and "ringing" but we are now stuck as to how to move on.

any suggestions would be gratefully received

[Bushfiva]

I will make a VERY hesitant guess but a cheap one to test, since you have one combination which does work: one of the ADSL filters is bad. Or, if you don't have a little box thingy on each of your phone outlets, you don't have an ADSL filter.

I suggest you buy one, connect up the one solution you know works, but this time via the filter, and see if you can still connect. If you can, it's a filter woe.

(I hope I'm not teaching anyone to suck eggs here. The high-frequency ADSL signal is piggy-backed on the low-frequency phone signal. At your end, you need a filter that splits off the signals, so the modem only sees the high frequencies, and the phones only see the low frequencies. The boxes are small and very cheap.)

[DG101]

A filtered faceplate (http://www.adslnation.com/products/xte2005.php) may fix the problem.