Telephone socket not working

[Skinleech]

Hi All,

We moved house a few months back and have slowly been renovating/decorating and are now about to get the living room finished. The house was split into 2 flats for several years and there's a phone socket in the living room and some sort of ham-fisted job done to supply a phone socket to the upstairs. We are going to locate the router in the living room and disconnect the cables leading upstairs as the cables run along the living room wall, through the kitchen, outside, in through the bathroom top the hallway!

However I have just discovered the phone line downstairs doesn't actually work, just the one upstairs. Obviously I want to ensure the phone socket downstairs works before I disconnect upstairs so any help or advice that can be offered would be very useful.

Here are a couple of photos of the set up.

1 2

Thanks.

[peterb]

You need to determine where the incoming line is. The first socket will be the master socket which contains components to provide a measure of surge protection and break out the ring cable (which isn't really needed with modern telephones)

The master socket is the boundary between your service provider's cabling and your cabling and is likely to be the Openreach branded box.

If you take the front panel off, you should find a telephone socket underneath. Plug a phone into that and you should get a dial tone. Any secondary wiring to extension sockets is made to the terminals on the panel you removed and will only be active when the panel is replaced.

It is hard to see from the photos, but if there is more than one cable going into the main part of the box, that is probably very bad DiY wiring as you should not interfere with the network provider's cable.

If you do, it is at your own risk, but if there are two cables, you need to determine which is the incoming line and terminate that at the back of the main unit, and then run any extensions off the terminals on the front plate.

[Skinleech]

Thanks for the reply peterb and apologies for nil reply so far, had family through from Australia so no time for tinkering.

Seems I was mistaken anyway as what I thought was the master socket isn't connected to anything, so the socket at the top of the stairs must be the master and the 2 downstairs are just a weird diy extension to the master and can be removed which is great!

[peterb]

No probs, glad you have a way ahead!

[DanceswithUnix]

If the house was two flats, then I presume it had two master sockets at some point?

[Skinleech]

It wasn't officially two flats - they stuck a locked door in the stairway as the access upstairs then deadbolted the downstairs from the living room side & used the back door as the entrance.

Weird stuff!