That tool will do at that price as it's with free postage, I would grab it quick as it seems only a few left.
I wouldn't touch the all plastic ones, they are about as good as a chocolate fireguard, and usually DIY sheds rip you off at about £2 a go, they might do one socket before being u/s.
An alternative would have been
this for 99p, and only when ordering the
CW1308 Cable, the correct twisted pair (2 pair) cable as used by BT (you don't need 3 pair cable - in fact you are only going to use 1 pair anyway) and also
3.5mm clips all for the total of £1 p&p on top of the price of the goods. One of the best deals I know from a
reliable source. You may decide to use say 15mm square plastic trunking instead of clips or whatever, obviously that is down to you and how you want your decor.
Now before you rush off to order a suitable number of metres of cable, there is one final check you need to do (and a small change at the same time which might give an improvement for now).
First, pull the
mains power plug on the modem/router, then after about a minute, unplug it from the line/filter. Ideally, it's best to log into it first and click on the 'Disconnect' button that you'll see under Connection Status on the Home page of the 2704n. That action drops the PPP Internet session (not sync) which is to help avoid a possible stale session. Pulling the power plug gives a 'more graceful' loss of sync and is preferred to just unplugging it from the line which could be seen by DLM as a dropped connection.
Once that is done, then at the GPO connector box (detail b.jpg in reply #3) -
1) Disconnect the Orange+white trace wire from the top left hand terminal, where the Green wire is on the cable that goes up the wall (we believe to the socket upstairs) - you can put the Orange+white trace on the top RH terminal. Those two terminal aren't connected to each other so the wires are now isolated and can't touch any others. This is the bell-wire - not needed in a broadband situation and is an unbalanced wire in that old type cable which is not twisted pair either. This combination will pick up lots of interference with a resultant slow speed. We will leave it like this, as it should give a significant improvement even though we still have cable that is not twisted pair.
2) The more critical part of this test, remove the white wire from the middle terminal on the left (careful not to damage it) this is one leg of the incoming line. Leave it sticking in the air not touching the terminal or any others., and just gently do up the terminal for now. If everything is as we think, if you now go to the upstairs socket and check it with your phone, it should be dead - no dial tone. If that is the case, then reconnect the White wire to the middle terminal on the left, making sure as best you can that the connection is clean and amply tight (don't overtighten).
Check the bottom left hand terminal for cleanliness and it being adequately tight. Checking the socket upstairs again, dial tone should have returned and the line should be crackle free. If there are crackles, check the connections on the middle and bottom LH terminals at the GPO box for cleanliness and tightness again.
3)
IF perchance and only if, when the White wire is removed from the middle terminal, the socket upstairs is not dead, then there's some star wiring somewhere - so do the following for now -
Remove the Blue wire from that LH middle terminal (not the Blue+white trace on the RH middle) and reconnect the White wire to the LH middle terminal.
Then, remove the bright Orange wire from the bottom LH terminal, leaving the pale Orange one connected.
So that should be that the cable going up the wall - the one with the orange, blue, green and brown wires is not connected to anything except the green is isolated on the top LH terminal. Once more check that the socket upstairs is not dead. IF it damn well is dead, reconnect the bright orange wire and check again. If it now has dial tone there is something really odd going on with the wiring.
On the assumption that 3) the "IF perchance" isn't so, ie. having done 1) & 2) successfully then go back upstairs and plug the modem/router into the line and then power it up. As soon as it's booted (Power and Broadband lights green and stable + hopefully the Internet one), then log into it using
This link for the full xDSL stats (link is also in my sig) and copy and paste them into a post asap. Hopefully we'll see some reasonable figures and we can comment further.
- as your diagram is only one of the possibilities, which is why I've asked all the questions, and in the order that I have.
