Funny phone line setup when wiring an extension

gerrowadat

Howdy folks, just moved into my new place, brand new house, brand new phone line. It was all connected up and I had a new-style eircom master socket in the kitchen. Dialled 1901 and was connected within the hour. Perfect. DSL got enabled no bother. Now, on to the problem:

There's a phone extension socket upstairs, which I want to move the router to. It had a blanking plate on it when I moved in, but I went and got an rj11 socket, and got the multimeter out to see which pair eircom had used for the circuit. All pairs dead.

Opened up the master socket downstairs, there's only one cable coming into it. Not good. This is obviously the cable coming in from the eircom box on the wall outside, so I head outside and pry it off. Two cables. One going downstairs, one going upstairs. One connected to the eircom equipment, one hanging loose.

My understanding is that there should be one cable coming in from outside, and the extension should be going from the eircom master socket to upstairs. However, I've got two cables coming from outside, one of which isn't connected to anything outside (and which I can only assume goes right from there to upstairs)

So, my question is: Is this normal? Have phone line setups changed since I last fiddled with them? Am I stuck with ringing eircom to get an engineer out, or is there anything I can do myself? (I realise I can splice one pair of the extension cable outside into one pair of the main cable and extend that way, but I'm wondering if there's a 'right way' to do it?)

Suggestions welcome. Suggestions that involve me not having to wait weeks for eircom to get their collective fingers out more welcome.

Thanks.

Our man in Havana

It is most likely the phone upstairs was intended to be a separate line. Eircom normally run in 2 pairs to the outside box.

By rights the extension should go from the eircom master downstairs to the socket upstairs. No easy way round it except to splice the extenstion into the outside box otherwise a visit from eircom is needed.

gerrowadat

Called eircom, who want 57 quid for the callout then 27 quid per half hour after that. Yeesh. Has to be done though, won't do to have a DSL router sitting on the kitchen table indefinitely.

They say 2 working days, which made me stifle some heartly laughter. I'll see how we get on.

ST

Is the "new-style eircom master socket" the one with the DSL filters built in to it. It has two sockets on the front - One for the DSL modem, and one for the House phones.

If so you will probably need to move this upstairs where you want to put the Router.

Generally phone cable has at least 2 pairs in them, and since you only need 1 pair for the phoneline, you should have a spare pair.

If you move the master socket upstairs and plug your router in there. If you take the cover off the master socket there should be two terminals where you can wire any internal phone extensions.

Connect the spare pair on the cable feeding upstairs to these, and back at the junction box, connect this pair to the pair on the cable feeding the socket in the kitchen.

Generally it's the electricians on site who wire houses not Eircom Engineers, they just come out and fit the master socket, that is generally where their responsibility ends.

Had a friend who had phone problems. Eircom came out and replaced cable feeding one socket, but wouldn't fix other extension upstairs.