By Howard | Published March 10, 2009
It’s one of those “why didn’t I think of that before?!” moments. BT are selling a device called the iPlate at the moment claiming that for 7 out of 10 people it will increase their DSL speed by filtering out the noise from the bell wire in your master socket. By all accounts it does exactly what they describe. I only bothered looking this up today after hearing about it a few weeks ago, and it occurred to me: if the bell wire is the offender here, why not just disconnect it from my wiring altogether? It’s not as if I have any clunky analogue phones that will suddenly cease ringing. In fact, I use my BT line purely for DSL anyway, who cares if the phones don’t ring!
So, I opened up my master socket and disconnected the wire at pin 3 – the bell wire. Plugged it all back in and found an immediate speed boost of approximately 2Mb. I fully expect this to increase as my ISP (Be Unlimited) rate up their equipment to match my now far less lossy line.
If you’re handy with a screwdriver and don’t much care about the rules about messing with BT’s sockets it could well be worth your while pulling the wire out of pin 3. And if you’re a bit scared of that and you have the right master socket, BroadbandBuyer can ship you an iPlate for less than BT charge, and they actually have them in stock!
Unsurprisingly, this is old news for some people.
Categories: Hardware, Infrastructure, Internet
NB: tampering with a BT line is indeed an offence and whilst not punishable by death, i do know of cases where BT have simply cut people off for tampering. Back in student days, some friends of mine added an extension line to the BT socket which involved opening up the master BT socket; when next a BT engineer popped round for something else, he spotted the line, reported it and next thing, their line was cut. BT also refused to reinstate the line. Now that was a while ago, but I imagine similar policies are still in place.
Thankfully, i doubt they check the blogosphere for posts saying ‘i’ve been tampering with my BT line’ – they’re pretty incompetent at most things these days ;-)
Of course, it’s only the BT master socket and the line up to that point that this applies to. If you have extended your phone line (without opening up the master box, by simply plugging in an extension for example) , then you can tamper with that section to your hearts content.
I only mention this as if you have no BT line, it is still incredibly hard to get broadband, even since Local Loop Unbundling (what a joke LLU is). So yes, you may get faster broadband but should anything go wrong, you may be left with no broadband at all.
The other option which I ended up doing when I had broadband stability problems a while back is to totally separate the broadband from the internal extension wiring. I now have a replacement faceplate that separates off the ADSL signal at the master socket rather than filters in each of the extension sockets in the house.
It’s ok to remove the bell wire if you have a split BT master socket see google for it or see http://broadband-speedup.blogspot.com as easy as fitting an I-plate and gives a good speed boost!
is old news for sure found a really clear set of instructions and photos at broadband-speedup.blogspot.com must admit i’ve done it yet hence why i’m still searching around as i’m not sure if how it is described it is legal or not. Ed.