Ok, so I've searched in every room in the house, and I don't have a master socket anywhere (the house is about 20 years old, unless there's some other type of master?). Instead, I've found a small "elongated oval" sort of shaped junction box in the loft with "British Telecom" on it.

My phone line enters straight into the loft, with two thin black wires going into the junction box. From there, I have three wires coming off and going to various places around the house.

I'm trying to see if I can increase my internet speed/lower my attenuation (3Mbps/56dB) at all, so if I wired a phone filter straight into this box, would it help (seeing as I can't plug into the master!)? I've already removed the ring wires from all the sockets.

Thanks

p.s. sorry if this is in the wrong category, I thought it best suited here...

classic case of star wiring that, used to do it when we couldn't be a*7ed doing a proper job. one of your sockets in the house will have a capacitor in it. this will be the master socket.

you've already disconnected pin 3 from all sockets so the bell wire issue will no longer have an effect.

you can contact your service provider and tell them you want to add your own ext'n but have no NTE5. they will task us to install you one(where the block terminal is in your loft(we have to put it at the first point of entry)). this should be done free of charge, but double check.

it sounds like your fed by old dropwire 4/6, an untwisted flat 2 core cable. this is good and bad for adsl in that it's good (high poundage(thicker copper)), bad, untwisted(more prone to interference).
this cable also doesn't have any UV protection and is very prone to cracking and rusting on the outside walls (usually at bends or at the clamp on house) which can cause noise issues and increase your attenuation.

under the reg's you are not allowed to tamper with this box as it's technically our wiring, however i'm not suggesting you buy an NTE5 from ebay and change it out yourself.

If I search all of the sockets for one with a capacitor and plug the router in there, will that help the speed then? Or am I best "not" fitting my own NTE5 in the loft? Which do you think would have the better effect, if any at all?

Also, is there any way I could get them to change the dropwire to a twisted cable to try and lower the attenuation, or is that a tree not worth barking up?

Thanks

I would say the best way to eliminate any possible ADSL problems caused by the house wiring is to separate out the phone and ADSL signals at the master socket. That's easy for me because our BT line comes into the house near the front door. In your case that would be an NTE5 in the loft.

There is a faceplate filter which replaces the normal front plate NTE5 socket and has filtered connections on the back for wiring to phone extensions. On it's front it also has a socket for the ADSL modem and another telephone socket.

No other filters are then required around the house but you would need an additional cable run direct from the modem to the loft.

Before spending any money on this have you tried your postcode on a website which will estimate your likely maximum speed?
(Having said that BT currently estimate 6mbps for my connection and speed tests are measuring up to 14mbps. )

by putting the NTE5 in the loft, you can then go into the test socket with the router and see what difference it makes, if the improvement is very noticable then there could be an issue on your internal wiring. if your internal wiring is o.k. and you have already disconnected the bell wire from all sockets then having the nte in the loft won't make much difference.
as the previous post said you may want to go down the filtered faceplate route, which would mean you having to run a cat 5 cable from the nte5 to wherever your want the router to be, but this would then eliminate all effect your house has on the b/band.
your attentuation to speed ration is pretty good, at the mo, but it could increase by going into an nte5 in the loft.
The postcode checkers are as reliable as a chocolate fireguard, some have said that by using the phone number you can get a closer result , but still i wouldn't trust them.

chaging the dropwire to the latest type will only improve it if the existing one is faulty, the effects that the dropwire has only take into affect after about 3 or 4 long spans. over a short distance your current one is better as it is higher poundage so will lower the attenuation(only ever so slightly though).
on regular dropwire 0.5mm conductor its about 90M length to 1dB of line loss. on yours 0.9mm conductor its about 150M length to 1dB drop. your maximum span length is about 50-70M.

I used one of these before joining up with O2 broadband and their surprisingly high estimate turned out to be right.

The checkers I've tried in the last couple of days are very pessimistic for some reason.

hopefully they will start to get better, our test system is now able to test a line to give the attenuation reading. not currently active on all circuits but getting there. when a line is installed, this test is run on it, and the results are stored. if the line alters in some way, mainly the attenuation increases by 6dB. the system will raise a task for us to investigate providing the EU is having no problems.

it does the test at 1.6Khz (adsl is around 300Khz) and then uses an algorithm up scales it. upon physically testing a line with a meter i've found them to fairly accurate (+-2dB).

completely off topic i know but hopefully, when the CP's start using it more people will get a more accurate reading of what they should expect.

Interesting stuff, thanks.