Hey, before I spend 2 hours waiting for someone at BT to answer the phone I thought I would ask on here.

A couple of weeks ago I had my BT line installed, at the time I noticed that the engineer who installed the line had put something on the outside of the house which I have never seen before or none of my neighbours have. It is black and looks as though the cable goes into one end and then out of the other. I have taken acouple of pictures (see below) to see if anyone can tell me what it is or does?

Image One
Image Two
Image Three

Thanks.

i could be wrong but it looks like they give you a spire

Thanks ilovekrys, may I ask what a spire is please?

in short bt have ran out of space in the exchange and your using someone elses line will sort off i think thats how they put it anyway
also you may or maynot be able to have broadband on it has well
but like i said i could be wrong if i am wrong im sorry

Hmm thats interesting. I do get broadband but not as fast as I was hoping - I only get 8mb downloads when I should be getting 16mb because I only live 750m from the exhange.

Does anyone else have any suggesions as to what this might be?

It looks like a cable joiner. We have one similar but it further along the cable.

It makes sense to have a joiner there, if the wire comes down at all, or they need to replace the cantenary wire - they can do it without pulling the cable off your wall.

Did you complain about the rough job of wiring they did down your bargeboards?

hi all
the said piece of kit is the new dropwire closure , if we go on a task repair or provide and there is a bt16 small box on the eves etc(white ,brown black in colour). we must replace this with the new closure.as it is deemed 100% waterproof and if we do not change these out depending on the area the good old auditor will give the engineer a 10 point failure (manager then gets involved slapped wrists etc)

So is this something which may affect my broadband download speeds?

only when it fills up with water (usually after the first bit of rain. with regards to your broadband speed, does your router show you connected as adsl 2+ or g.dmnt (something like that, can never remember the correct lettering) i'm on 16meg (with sky) and i was only getting 8, a few calls later and they said cos of the distance from exchange(850M) next lot of phone calls later they again said distance from exchange till i informed them that i was actually calling them from it (turns out that someone had "forgot" to put my line on adsl 2+) now enjoy the full 16.

their gonna get a defect any way, they missed the last helix on the clamp (pic 3).

Hey openreachpeep, when you say "defect" what do you mean?

bloodyhell you,ve got some eye sight i had to enlarge to see that. youre not an auditor by any chance

Christ that's bad! The auditors will have a field day with that!

eyes like an hawk, but no not an auditor. picked up a 5 pointer today for not submitting an a1024 for blue beans. i'd put in a network live job for it. but i guess they have to justify their job.

I am using a (SKY) Netgear wireless router , where might I find this info from ?

Hi all, I just thought I'd give you an update.

I spotted a BT engineer sat in his white van this morning down the road so I asked him what the black "sausage shaped" thing was.

Basically he said it was a kind of splitter. He said that the cable from the telegraph pole is capable of carrying 2 lines. He said that in the future if I required a second line it could just be connected to this instead of adding a second wire from the pole. Inside he said it was just full of grease and they were only invented a couple of months ago and replaced the previous style which did the same thing.