75ZT Community

Some may well know of this already, but thought it worth a mention.

One thing that can affect your broadband speed is interference. There are some things sold to help with this, for example there's an iplate. This adds a filter and can help in some cases.

However, doing a bit of reading, you can sometimes get the same effect for free.

The interference can get into your wiring like this: from the exchange to your telephone master socket there are two wires. Then in the master socket an extra wire is used to make the telephone ringer work. This third wire can carry interference around and these filters like the iplate stop that affecting your broadband.

However, most modern phones don't use this extra wire, so you can get the same effect by simply disconnecting it. You need to check whether your phones still work afterwards, and put it back if not.

It's worth a try. I've seen claims of up to 67% speed increase, but myself did way better. With the ring / bell wires connected, I was achieving 1.2 Meg download, as checked by a speed checker. Been like that since we got broadband years ago. Disconnected the wire and didn't see an immediate change, but that's normal as your service gets adapted to what your line will handle. I was amazed when next time I checked we were over 2 meg. Kept checking, and we seem to have stabilised at well over 4 meg. All for ten minutes work! Doesn't make a difference for everyone, though.

I'd say that's a rather well-spent 10 minutes

I've noticed too that the extension sockets on the first floor of our house do not carry sufficient quality to hold an ADSL signal in our house. So by connecting our router directly to the main socket (the one mounted to the master socket) we've been able to get around 8Mbps download speeds. I suspect if we removed the ringer wire as per your suggestion it may clear up the interference/poor line quality on the other sockets around the house

Sounds like urban myth to me.....as an Ex BT engineer, the third wire, is nothing more then the ringing circuit. If you disconnect it, it will stop any extension phones ring, and when you dial out any other phones will chirp.......

Broadband speed is based on a lot of things, distance from exchange, demand, quality of the local network and demand. I'd be amazed if this had anything to do with the speed.

After reading this I ordered an Iplate from BT as they are free for total broadband customers, connection speed has remained the same, 6,784 Kbps. Until recently it was 8.04KBps I am just yards from the BT exchange. I presume there has been further take up of the service by locals. Not possible to get any kind of accurate download speed as this varies from test server to test server and also varies from moment to moment. I use Menu Meters, which does show an accurate real time down and upload speed on my Mac. The best I have had recently is 442.5Kb/s and that is from Apple servers when requesting software updates. I have seen it as high as 474 Kbps on previous occasions
The bell wire trick may well improve the quality of your local phone network if has been introducing interference on the internal wiring. Having said that, your microfilters should have ironed that problem out.

greeners wrote:Sounds like urban myth to me.....as an Ex BT engineer, the third wire, is nothing more then the ringing circuit. If you disconnect it, it will stop any extension phones ring, and when you dial out any other phones will chirp.......

Broadband speed is based on a lot of things, distance from exchange, demand, quality of the local network and demand. I'd be amazed if this had anything to do with the speed.

Believe me, I'm not making it up.

Yes, the third wire is the ringing circuit. Split out via a capacitor. Also, I was told (but haven't checked) the ringing / bell circuit is re-generated in the ADSL filter. I think my change was so dramatic because my ADSL filter is a long way from the master socket, and all the rest of the house is then fed from the output of the ADSL filter.

Most modern phones don't use it as they are electronic. All my phones ring fine, no chirping but then I'm using DTMF not pulse, so it wouldn't be a problem anyway.

If the thing was merely an urban myth, then I would have thought BT and others selling the iplate would have been in court by now for selling snake oil. Basically the iplate is a new faceplate for your socket, that puts a filter into that ringing circuit. Disconnecting the wire has the same effect of preventing interference being fed back into the rest of the wiring.

Remember the wires are twisted pairs. This helps prevent pickup of noise. However the bell / ringing circuit uses only one of a pair so is unbalanced and doesn't benefit from the twisting either. There's plenty of info to be found, like here:
http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/top-stori ... s-stockist
and here:
http://www.homebroadbandhelp.co.uk/what ... bt-iplate/