Spaghetti Phone Wiring
The other weekend, I moved the Wifi Hub from the backroom to the middle of the house. We’d also been getting some issues with the broadband dropping out so it seemed a good opportunity to check if there were any issues.
This mostly involved crawling in the loft, drilling long holes, a bit of head-scratching and a lot of reading. My first step was to take a look at the wiring between the cable entering the house and the master socket. I found a horrible mess of tape. I knew you weren’t supposed to change the wiring between the post and the master socket so it was a case of checking for loose connections, making sure the cables were properly supported and making it look a bit neater. So I fitted the box to the beam, removed an extension that had been fitted to one of the bedrooms and cable clipped the wires in place. There was still a second line connected up but as I had no reason to disconnect that I left it in place. There was actually a third line connected up too which is hooked up to a burglar alarm but that one looked ok and I did not need to change it.
Now that I had a good starting point, I needed to fit a wire between the rooms. As mentioned, this mostly comprised of drilling some long holes. I used a twisted pair cable with 4 pairs. Only 3 wires are used for standard telephone wiring but it is useful to have the others in case I want to connect anything else up.
I mentioned lots of reading, this was mostly about the colour codes of the wiring and what the different signals are. Basically, there is a pair of wires for the signal and a third wire for the ringing. As you can see from the first photos there are 2 wires coming into the building. This is where the master socket comes in. That splits off the ringing signal from the voice signal and turns it from 2 wires to 3. These components are also used when the “line test” is done as they give a distinctive characteristic to the electrical properties.
I did look at using a socket with a built in filter but that seemed to be unreliable and I swapped it out for a microfilter that was known to be working. What I didn’t realise is that leaving your router unplugged for a while causes the system to do a bunch of self tests so that could have been why things were unstable for a period after I’d plugged in back in again.
Once I had connected things up. I could fit the WiFi hub on a shelf in the office. This allows for a good signal in all parts of the house but we do have some mains repeaters for those things that needed ethernet.
Since making the change things do seem to be a bit more reliable so hopefully no further changes will be needed.
Metal sculpture in brass, mounted on an 1800s French Coin
Why did the author decide to move the WiFi hub to a different location in the house?
The location of the router was on one side of a large house which meant that some parts of the house had poor signal. Moving it to a central location meant that all areas got a better signal. However we did implement a mesh router system at a later date which provided even better coverage.