Solwise Press Release

Standard domestic telephone wiring uses three wires to carry the signal between the master socket and the extensions. Two of these wires come from the outside and are connected directly to your local telephone exchange. The third wire is generated in your master socket and carries the 'bell' signal which is used to ring some old-fashioned telephones when someone calls you.

If you have an ADSL service with each phone connected to a micro-filter then the bell-wire is completely redundant since a bell signal is generated in each micro-filter for the few phones which still need it. Now, unfortunately, this bell-wire tends to cause some degradation to the ADSL signal as it travels about your house.

The Solwise solution to this problem would be to detach the front section of your master socket and disconnect the bell-wire(s) (from pin 3) and re-fit the faceplate.

The BT solution is called the iPlate! This device places a filter on the bell-wire (which remember is not required!).

(The best solution for ADSL wiring is based on a centralised master faceplate splitter such as our ADSL-NTEFACE models, please consider this option if you have ADSL signal quality issues.)

A BT spokesman told ISPreview: "We can’t comment on how effective taking Solwise’s advice would be. However, the iplate has been exhaustively tried and tested and therefore we can be sure that it works.

If you take their advice but disconnect or damage something by mistake you will have pay for an engineer to come and fix it, the master socket is BT property.

A number of broadband service providers including BT Retail offer the iplate for free."