Hi,

I recently moved into a house and got my land line activated last week.

Plugged the phone into the socket downstairs and it works fine. Tried it in the socket upstairs and there is nothing. Went for a look outside the house and can see we appear to have 2 lines coming from the central pole which feeds all the houses in the street.

Does this mean I have 2 separate BT lines?

You would appear to have two physical lines.

It certainly doesn't mean they are both connected.

So they are probably 2 different lines yes and not just 2 different means of getting to one connection?

Well, I'm not an expert on BT side wiring, but I think it's safe to say that they would not use two physical lines for one connection.

Strange as it seems, some people DID have two seperate telephone lines into one house.

Some relatives of mine, before the advent of broadband, had two lines. One was just for the computers dial up internet access, so they sould still use the phone when on the computer.

I had 2 landlines for the above reason.

I retain 2 landlines because connecting 3 multi room Sky boxes to the my regular phone line slugs my ADSL so I now have my Sky boxes connected to an exclusive telephone line.

Before broadband we had 2 lines, one for phone calls and the other mostly for dial-up internet.