Where Eircom connects inside my house?

Swampy

Hi all,

Got a ntl phone and I want to hook it up to my eircom wall sockets. Could anyone suggest a place to look in order for me to find where the eircom connection comes in so I can disconnect it? I live in a fairly new build ( 5 years). Would it be behing a panel, or a phone socket?

Many thanks.

S.

FusionNet

Swampy wrote: »

Hi all,

Got a ntl phone and I want to hook it up to my eircom wall sockets. Could anyone suggest a place to look in order for me to find where the eircom connection comes in so I can disconnect it? I live in a fairly new build ( 5 years). Would it be behing a panel, or a phone socket?

Many thanks.

S.

Its hard to say not knowing the building, as in is it a house, an appartment block etc? If you have several sockets in your house it'll either be behind the main one marked with the eircom logo or if its an apartment they could all be terminated in a comms room somewhere in the builing.

What kind of building is it?

Capt'n Midnight

if you have white boxes on the side of the house it may be in these

BUT I'm sure there are rules about what you can't do to eircom's copper

MickyJoe

As Capt'n Midnight said:

Normally there will be service boxes located in the external walls of the house - location varies but these will normally be grouped together and is where your ESB meter reader will be looking for the meter readings.

The ESB box is quite large and there may be a similar size one if you have gas.

There is usually one or two smaller ones - one for the Eircom line (might be shared with other services) and other ones may be for (e.g) cable television.

In the service box for Eircom the incoming line would normally be a black cable. This in turn will be connected to a cable (or maybe many - depending on how the builder wired your house). Disconnecting the pair from the black cable will disconnect you from the incoming line - what you can do with the cables for inside depends on how they are wired.

FusionNet

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

if you have white boxes on the side of the house it may be in these

BUT I'm sure there are rules about what you can't do to eircom's copper

There are no Rules!!! You can disconnect an eircom line if you know what your at, the only ones you wanna avoid is Leased line, they get a bit ratty about that alright!!!! As I said before unless you tell us what kind of place your living in there is no point advising you about comms rooms, white boxes..

Swampy

Thanks guys. I live in a town house. Theres boxes outside alright. I'll post some photos tommorow of what I got. Thanks again.

Solair

In a new build house the first master socket, with the eircom branding is the demarkation point.

Open the socket as follows:

Remove 2 screws on the front and remove the face plate.
Remove 2 screws behind the face plate and the socket should come off the wall in the same way a light switch would.
Disconnect the eircom line at this point and tape off the cables with electrical tape ensuring they are not short circuiting / touching.

If you've an older build house, you'll typically find the eircom line terminates either at a black or grey junction box in your hallway or at the first beige eircom / telecom socket. In this case, just disconnect it here and tape off the cables.

Normally, the sockets are daisy chained i.e. (Socket 1) -> (Socket 2) -> (socket 3) etc.. However, you may find they could be in a star configuration where they all connect back to the master socket independently or to a junction box. It entirely depends on the layout of your house and the mood of the installer on the day There's no specific rule and either methodology produces the same results.



DO NOT touch anything that's on the front of your house or on the street as this is most definitely eircom property and would be considered the 'network side'. If you were to accidently disconnect something you could end up interrupting someone else's service and may end up receiving a hefty bill for damage if they need to be called out to put it right.

In any modern installation, the first eircom socket is the demarkation point between your property and theirs. So, just don't connect anything before that master socket as it's network equipment!

This document explains how a modern (post 2001) eircom installation is done:

http://www.reci.ie/technicalinfo/eircominterface.pdf

Note the terminology for the connectors:

Line 1:
L1
L2

Line 2 (If you have a Second Line):
S1
S2

R = not used and is only there for backwards compatibility with ancient installations supplying hardwired phones with a 3-wire setup that have old bell ringers.

You don't need to worry too much about the ISDN or Alarm terminals unless you've got phonewatch (or similar) etc These are marked IN / OUT

The only ones you should be using or L1 and L2 for a normal phone line.

MickyJoe

You really need to check in the services box (the white box outside usually placed in the wall of your house as explained before - if it exists ) outside how many cables are connected to the incoming line. Lots of houses have multiple points taking their feed directly from here to various points in the house (e.g upstairs might be on a different cable to downstairs - depends on how the builder wired the house). You can't be sure that the rest of the house is wired after a single connection to a master socket.

If there is a single cable with one pair of wires connected to the incoming line then there is a good chance that the rest of the connections will feed off the main socket. If there are more connections than this in the services box then you will have to do the disconnection in the services box.