I'll try and keep this to the point and hopefully someone can give me a clue as to where to start to sort the problem.

The house I have just moved into originally had BT and has several BT sockets around the house. For the last few years the previous vendor has had NTL and I assume has had the other sockets hooked up NTL.

I've had the BT line re-connected and the previous vendor has cancelled NTL.

My problem is that I only have the BT master socket as the only useable socket at present. I cannot get a ringtone off any of the others. How do I change this?

I've opened the BT master socket and the cable coming through has the blue&white and white&blue connected to the BT master socket. From the same cable the ornage & white and white & ornage go to the NTL socket that I presume is no longer live.

Should I put these orange cables into the BT master socket?


Thanks for any advice

Assuming you are talking about the lead that is feeding the extension sockets, and not the lead that is coming in from the street to feed the master socket, you should open some of the extension sockets to see what is connected there.

If they are connected using white and orange then you can swap over to blue and white in the extensions, or pull the orange and white back to the BT socket and connect it there.

Thanks for the tip Nobby.

I've checked another socket and found it was another master socket which is confusing.

That set up is:

1- empty
2- Blue & blue/white
3- Green & orange/white
4- white/orange
5- Orange & white/blue
6- empty

Could this be where the problem lies, having to master sockets?

I've tried just connecting the blue/white & white/blue only as per the other master socket but no joy.

Is the working socket a NTE5 style socket or one of the older LJU style sockets? Easy to tell apart. the NTE5 is bigger and has a split front panel where the lower half can unscrew. under the panel attached to the backing box you find the test socket and on the inside of the romoveable panel are terminations for any extension wiring you want to add.

Thing is if you have the old style LJU type socket you cannot remove it's front panel and wire onto the internal terminals legally. Only BT can do anything to the internals of the socket.

My inclination would be to find the old NTL master socket and try to trace which cable goes off to the rest of the exrtensions and which is the incomming NTL line. Remove the old NTL line wires from this socket and then run a single pair from terminals 2 and 5 of this socket to the extension terminals on the BT master (assuming you have an NTE5 of course). That should hook up all your extensions to the new BT line.

Oh and having more than one master socket on a line is no problem. If you have broadband and ADSL filters on your various extensions then you effectively have made all the extensions into Master sockets anyway. The filter contains the additional componenets found inside a master that you don't get in a secondary (extension) socket.

Hi Chris,

The working BT socket is the older style so looks like a BT job then. No wonder I was having problems understanding it all.

I'll have a look at what you've stated though to see if I can get my head around this mess. It's a mightly long extension cable from my computer to the master socket at the moment

Many thanks