Openreach, Sky Fibre... and noise!

[David Koh]

Hi there dumping my expertise:

Was this white to black box switch likely to have been done at the time of fibre installation? Or subsequently?

White box is called box con 16A come in 5 colours and is literally a plastic box with a passive clip, has holes to mount to external surface and is not water tight other than cables enter from bottom.

Black tube is a Above ground enclosure which allows for water tight sealing, does not require fixing to the wall. rules are there can only be 1 joint between the pole/pavement and where your master NTE is (within 3 spans of overhead cable at a limit).

More importantly, what is the significance of the white box and the black box, and why have they been changed over?

Its an mandatory change to above ground enclosure on any fixing ythat you work on, aka I can observe a 16a but if I have no need to climb up to it (had to replace your old cable so should have been done on fttc install) I dont have to change it

In the last few days, I've noticed noise on the line. On calling Sky Talk - and running through tests including plugging directly into the test socket in the master socket box - they can't detect a fault. They've escalated it to a team higher up. Would this switch cause noise on the line? Fibre speeds are unaffected.

Simple line test wont detect a high resistance fault which is where the resistance at a certain point on the cable is much higher than it should be (something like 12ohms/foot/meter I dont remember) you will have noise since up and down for phone call is disturbed, it also causes electrical interference which can be noise.

If CP (sky/bt/o2/plusnet) orders an appointed fault then sometime a "non appointed fault" task is raised. All it means is go to the house, test it from as close as you can to the master socket and if you can locate it fix it.

If you had noise but DSL was fine (no loss in speeds/packets) then fault would have been in the cabinet or backwards. Easy to fix without you being at home.

In regards to "last accessable point" if you don't have to climb, don't. If the pole has a box at ground level your going to test from there, since you can see if its the same distance away as height of pole (=you gota climb lucky) and then can see length of cable and if the fault looks to be inside the house. If fault is the other way then we can work on it no worries.

Hope this is clear enough, any more questions?

 

[metro60]

Thanks for that, David.

The Openreach engineer visited a couple of days ago and identified the problem. Essentially, when the phone cable (to the telegraph pole) was moved from the white box to the black one, the (original) engineer didn't properly check the quality of the cable end which had disintegrated/loosened over time. The end fell away really easily from what I understand.

So a new end was cut/made(?) and re-inserted into the black box. All is now fine - my fibre broadband is back up to full speed, and the phone line is clear as expected

Thanks once again to all of you for your help and feedback along this thread. I hope that if anyone finds this conversation in the coming weeks and months, that it proves to be useful.