I am currently on SKY Broadband with a 10mB speed.

My phone socket in the house is an old style socket which is hardwired (Not a Master type socket with removable plate). And I have a filter plugged in for the Broadband

I am moving to BT Infinity 1 Fibre for various reasons. But in my email from them they are saying I do not need an engineer visit and the fibre will be activated in the local cabinet.

I don't have any of the kit from them yet so I don't know what comes on the package, but I know when we had Infinity 2 installed at work they came along and changed the socket for an all singing and dancing double faceplate with phone and network sockets on the front plate.

Do I need to have this done at home for my Infinity 1 and do I need to tell them about my current socket, of does infinity 1 run off a filter like my current broadband. And will this have any effect on my speeds etc?

It used to be the case that Openreach would fit a new front panel for the NTE5 type socket (the one with the two part front panel) which contained the filter circuits and provided separate sockets on it for the modem/router and phone.

Now you get a self install option which is basically similar in principle to ADSL where they just send you a bunch of filters that plug into the phone socket. Does exactly the same job but in a different package.

Whether there will be any effect on your speed depends to an extent on your internal wiring. If the incoming line lands on the master socket and there are no extensions wired off the master then provided the wiring and socket are in good nick it shouldn't have any effect.

If you have loads of extensions wired off the master then the quality of that cabling can have an effect. Mind you that is true even with an NTE5 type master as well. The advantage of the NTE5 type socket however is that you can replace the lower half of the front panel with various flavours of filtered panels. This means the extension wiring can be more effectively isolated from the incoming line and perhaps reduce any effect it has on the modem/router plugged into the master socket.

If you ask nicely you never know they may come out and replace the master free of charge for you. Technically you are not allowed to do so yourself though.

Thanks for that. I had all the internal extensions disconnected a few years ago when I had an engineer visit to fix a fault as they were not used.

I now have this single socket which is about 4 metres into the house from the outside cable.

Does that mean there is a cable junction somewhere? Last time I looked there were regulations about how far into the house the outdoor cable could be run and pretty sure it was a lot less than a metre. So that could mean there is a small box on the wall somewhere where the outdoor cable is jointed onto indoor cable.

If that is the case that is one other potential point of failure. But provided it hasn't been disturbed and is still in good working order there is not a lot that goes wrong with them. Usually it's things like having water poured into the box or the cables tugged that causes problems.

Or running indoor grade cable outdoors. That can cause problems with the insulation degrading and letting rain water in and even exposing the copper conductors causing short circuits.

There is a junction box about 0.5m from where it enters the house. I always assumed this was a cable fix at some point and not a regulation.

if box is inside your house, then there are probably 2 fusable links inside it. Just in case somebody somewhere connects their 30A cooker circuit to the phone line.

as above, longer extension wiring will give a bigger R.E.N., which wd also slow down the bbroadband, But if the extension has been disconnected then that's as good as u can do ........ it's also possible to replace the master socket although you're not supposed to ........

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringer_equivalence_number

http://www.britishtelephones.com/ren.htm

As long as everything works when you've plugged everything in, they won't send anyone to your house, unless you complain that it's running slow.

Well BT went live yesterday. They didn't come to the house, my Sky went off and about 30 minutes later I got an email saying my BT was now live. Only thing was I had no equipment as they only dispatched it Monday.

It turned up about an hour later, plugged the new filter in, powered up the new Hub and all was fine out of the box. Got about 36Mb down, 8Mb up on first test (I was getting 9Mb with Sky ADSL)

Was also moving to Youview after cancelling Sky, so had a mass de-wiring of all my AV to clean it up at the same time. That was fun, had splitters and extra cables on all sorts of things I don't even think I was using. That's what happens when you just keep adding over the years, if it works, leave it alone.

Sky box now running Freesat (with more channels than I expected). Pretty impressed with the Youview box and it's operation so far and my Roku box let's me get Now TV.

Now a happy bunny and about £50 per month better off without Sky.