UPDATE A Quick Look at BT Openreach’s New NTE5C Master Socket

Over the coming months BTOpenreach will start to introduce a new NTE5C Master Socket, which could make life a lot easier both for consumers who like to tinker and Openreach engineers who have no choice but to work with the existing sockets (NTE5 A / B) or even far older ones.

The new NTE5C Master Socket design, which I’ll grant you isn’t the most thrilling thing to talk about, first came to our attention last summer when it was mentioned on some of BT’s reports and then later alongside our coverage of the future standalone VDSL (FTTC) “fibre broadband” trials (here and here); Single Order Generic Ethernet Access (SOGEA).

A Master Socket represents the first / main point inside your home or office for connecting to Openreach’s outside copper cable, which makes it the best socket for connecting with your broadband router. At present most people probably still have one of BT’s older designs, which was a characterless cream coloured box with a removable bottom faceplate and often a BT logo at the top.

Since then Openreach has refined their design, particularly with the Mk2 and Mk3 that added better filtering to help tackle interference and a separate DSL (broadband) socket at the top. But otherwise nothing too significant has changed with their approach, until now.

Highlights of the New NTE5C

* On the outside the new socket doesn’t look too different, except for its slightly elliptical rounding on the front and slanting top (pictured above). As before the bottom face / front plate can also be changed, so for example you may have one with a single “phone” socket or a dual “phone” and broadband design.

* The faceplate removal is now a clipped ‘Tool Less‘ design (no screwdriver / screws required).

* Some extra work on the design has also been done to better protect the cables / circuitry inside from corrosion.

* The internal wiring isn’t as fiddly because there’s less of it and Openreach are now using colour coded ‘Cam Locks‘ for connectivity (the ‘Network’ wire will be RED and ‘Home’ wiring connections are BLUE).

* The home wiring is no longer connected to the faceplate, which again makes it even easier to swap according to the service being installed.

Officially speaking Openreach won’t tell us anything and claim that they’re still consulting with ISPs, although unofficially many of the details have been available since they were leaked out by The Computer Person blog. It’s not normally the sort of thing we’d write about, but a few people asked us for more information.

Ultimately it’s all about Openreach adapting to make engineer visits / new service installations faster and meanwhile ensuring that their sockets can deal with forthcoming products like G.fast or SOGEA.

UPDATE 8:14pm

After finding a copy of the relevant magazine we can now upload the official flyer and in a bit better quality.