Wrong line activated in house

[#1]

@bmc 

I still think there is something 'not quite right' here - from my reading of the way phone lines are installed and services provided, the 'split' occurs at the DP - whether it be an underground or overhead one - and a cable for each service is then run to the property, not as one cable that somehow magically splits at the end of the drop wire, As I said previously, one wire will only carry one connection from the DP.

[#2]

Think of a phone line as a ‘pair’ rather than the whole of the dropwire itself as that’s in effect the cable and there can be multiple pairs running alongside each other. Each pair can have its own service and number. 

I’m not in the office today, but from what’s said here, it sounds like we’ve restarted the Sky line rather than TalkTalk’s although we wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between the two lines. 

We could have manually ‘forced’ an engineer visit rather than carry out just external work, but even then there’s no guarantee they’d connect a specific pair, plus that other pair could have been re-used to a different property. 

[#3]

In my Daughter's case a multi core cable comes from the pole to a box on the next door neighbour's house.

Two wires emerge from the box.

1 wire drops down into the neighbour's house and the other carries on to my Daughter's house.

[#4]

Makes sense, @Strat - but you still have two distinct cables, each with a drop wire to the individual properties. I can't personally see BT running multi-core cable to one property, but I may be wrong.

[#5]

@jab1 

The drop wire to my house has 3 twisted pairs, one twisted pair in use by me with the other 2 pairs as spares.

[#6]

OK, @Strat - but I bet if you asked for a second line (if you were daft enough) it would be supplied via a second cable from the DP.

[#7]

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@Gandalf wrote:

We could have manually ‘forced’ an engineer visit rather than carry out just external work, but even then there’s no guarantee they’d connect a specific pair, plus that other pair could have been re-used to a different property. 

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Which I think I may have mentioned earlier. 😉

[#8]

@jab1  as with the case of the OP when I had a second line installed for work, Openreach just used one of the spare pairs. Standard practise is to use multicore cable from the pole, or underground DP - apart from anything else it adds strength. In my Army days we had multi strand pairs - D10 - x steel and y copper strands per leg or was it the other way round. The post office/BT took the view that a couple of extra pairs could be used as spares or extra lines.

Things have changed with fibre though - when the time comes you will only get one!

[#9]

OK, @Mustrum  - I stand (or sit) corrected.

Leaves me wondering why both my neighbours with two lines have got actual second cables from the DP?

[#10]

@jab1 As others have stated  multi-core cable to the property is a normal thing. I have an underground feed with 2 pairs at my current house, at a previous property with an overhead feed there were a lot of unused wires behind the master socket. in fact an Openreach engineer gave me a length of drop cable from his van when visiting to fix a fault as I wanted to run an external extension. This cable had 4 copper pairs so It helps if there is fault at the DP connection at the pole, a spare pair can be used as well as allowing multiple lines at a property if required.

[#11]

@RealAleMadrid As I replied to @Mustrum I accept the correction to my understanding of the wiring, but am still wondering in that case why my neighbours had to have two distinct cables from the DP in the lane. In both cases now, one of those runs is redundant.

[#12]

@jab1  Is there any chance that they have FTTP connections? That is a separate fibre cable?😮

[#13]

FTTP - 20 years ago when these were installed? 😀 Nope, and as it stands at the moment we won't be seeing FTTP for at least 3 years.

[#14]

@Gandalf sounds like exactly that has happened.
Is there anyway to have the cable switched if it is still unused?
Or does my line need to drop below the minimum speed for any chance of an engineer visit?

[#15]

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@Mustrum wrote:

Things have changed with fibre though - when the time comes you will only get one!

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I'm not sure about the newer method using a fibre 'drop' connection which plugs in to a CBT either in a chamber or on a pole which probably does have a single fibre per house, but with the original '2-stage' blown fibre method there are actually 4 fibres amalgamated together with some sort of silicone-like compound.  After that is blown through, the installer rubs the compound off with his fingers to separate the four fibres which are coated in a layer of different coloured plastic for each one, and neatly coils three of them as spares into the CSP tray, before the fourth one (blue in my case) is spliced to the internal fibre a few days later by the second installer.  Presumably the same thing is done to the four fibres at the other end in the underground street chamber tray.

Both methods are still used where I live as although some poles can be seen to have been over-built with CSPs in addition to their original manifolds, some still only have the original manifolds (including my pole),  confirmed by a friend having her install done by the 2-stage method just over a month ago.

Edit:  missing word