I have a 6 terminal nte5 socket. I get around 3MBps less plugged into the socket on the faceplate to being plugged into the test socket. I have therefore followed some tutorials and removed any wires not in terminals 2 & 5. However the difference in speed is still the same.

In terminals 2 & 5 in addition to the expected blue/white and white/blue wires (asumed to go out of the house) there are a red in 5 and a black in 2. I am wondering if these go to the extensions. I have just read that it is important to maintain powered twisted pairs and now I have removed the bell wire, I wonder if one of the wires to an extension will no longer be a proper twisted pair.

I dont want to spend £200 to move the master socket to a more convenient place for my router and there appears to be no consistent and definitive information on whether one can use a third party engineer, so I am trying to solve the speed problem internally.

Any help or advice greatly appreciated.

That red and black wire would to be a non standard type of cable used for telcom purposes. I think this is the type of wiring used for intruder alarm systems.
Any wires connected to the front plate will go off to your own internal extensions within your house, the incoming BT line will connect to the back of the test socket.
You need to identify where each cable goes and disconnect anyone you no longer need on that front plate

Anything connected to the faceplate is an extension. It cannot be otherwise. If you think about it for a moment it becomes obvious.

If the line were connected to the faceplate then how could the test socket work? It wouldn't be connected to anything?

Therefore both the pairs of wires connected to the faceplate terminals have to be internal to your property. And anything connected to the other end of that wiring MUST have a ADSL filter attached.

From what you describe I suspect that is not the case and that the unfiltered device is impacting on your ADSL signal. I would suspect the red and black wires. The Blue/White and White/Blue pair are the correct colour coding for BT spec cable used to wire up extensions..

As speckledhen says it could be a burglar or fire alarm system or something of that nature. If so then the red and black wires may be hard wired into the alarm control panel. Which would make it impossible for you to add a filter. That would be standard practice for an alarm, you don't want to make it too easy for Johnny Burglar to isolate your alarm by giving him a nice easy socket to unplug do you!

One option may be to buy a filtered face plate to replace the existing one. This has a built in filter with connections for extensions after the filter. So the extensions themselves plus anything hard wired don't need individual filters fitting.

http://www.solwise.co.uk/adsl_splitters.htm

As one potential source.

The only disadvantage of using the NTE 2000 or SSFP as it is also known is that the Router can only plug into that as all the other sockets on the system will be filtered unless you use an ADSL extn kit seen here
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/BT-ADSL-EXTENS...item3c9b6d8cae

If you go for the ADSL-NTEFACE-ATL on the Solwise site linked above, this has connections for both filtered and unfiltered extensions on the back. This will negate the issues that speckledhen has mentioned with the NTE2000 plate.

Not necessarily

The two units sold by Solwise have both filtered and unfiltered terminals for extensions. So as long as the extension you want to plug the router into is.not daisy chained off another you could wire that one to the unfiltered terminals and everything else to the filtered ones.

If the router extension is part of a daisy chain then every extension on the chain would be unfiltered. So not much difference to how it was before swapping the faceplate.

Hi chrisjr, thanks I really appreciate it. I get the topology now I think. bt wires into back of master, master mates with faceplate and faceplate has its own linked socket on the front. Off back of faceplate wires to extensions. Thank you, sorry to be dumb!!

1stly.
Some how after a day, and the router rebooting a few times, the latest speed has definitely been improved by the bell wire disconnection over previously consistently lower speeds plugged in the nte5 faceplate when the bell wire was still attached.

2ndly there is no alarm or any other fixed equipment, but there are three extensions. Two of the extensions had nothing in them atall, but I did find an unfiltered phone on the third extension in the attic that I had forgoten about. Experimentation with this plugged in and not, each on a few router restarts appeared to consistently show speeds better AGAIN with that phone unplugged, which suggests that was also part of the problem.

3rdly Regarding the wires: The red and black appear to go directly to extension 1 and nowhere else. The b/w and w/b appear to go to extension 2 and some more wires from THAT extension seem to then go up to the attic, extension 3. I have since moved the router from the nte5 faceplate to the afore mentioned extension 1. I am getting good speeds still, but consistently a little lower than in the nte5 faceplate.

My question is this. Since I almost definitely nolonger intend to use extensions 2 and 3 (now having 3 cordless) do you think the b/w and w/b wires to ext 2 and other wires to ext 3 could be causing some problems even with nothing plugged into them? I am considering removing the b/w and w/b wires from terminal 2 & 5 of the nte5 faceplate and JUST leaving the red & black that seem to run as twisted pair directly & only to ext 1. Some say one should only have the wires one is using and should remove all others?

Thank you again for all you help (and others too, thank you), I am beginning to understand this a little better now, but I still have a long way to go.

PS: In master socket highest ever negotiated speed was around 14000, in faceplate now highest so far is 13515, in ext 1 highest so far is 13,395

I suppose there is a chance that unused unterminated wires attached to the line could pick up interference that could get into the router. And an unfiltered phone will affect broadband performance. You have to remember that it is the phone socket that is filtered not the ADSL socket. In fact you could use a plain vanilla RJ11 socket to BT style plug adapter to connect your router to the line and it would work perfectly. The router is the ONLY thing that doesn't need filtering - in fact it must never be filtered or it stops working!

So it may well have an effect if the unused extensions are removed. But just be careful. If the wires to the unused extensions are under the wires for the used extension in the terminal block pulling them out will also remove the wanted wires.

What you must NOT do in that scenario is use a screwdriver to attempt to re-terminate the wires. This will only end up damaging the terminals and probably prevent them gripping the wires correctly and making a good connection. You must use the correct tool for this. Or cut the unwanted wires very close the the terminal block and splay out the ends so there is no danger of them coming into contact.

I've come across unused extensions causing issues as well.... disconnecting them entirely or sometimes just the 'bell wire' connector helps.