How do I rewire phone lines?

Question

We moved into a house that had two different phone lines. We canceled one and that line was used in a lot of the rooms of the house. How do I get those phone jacks to work with the one phone line we have now? I opened up the box outside and there's an L1 with a red and green wire and L2 with a red and green wire. Now what do I do? How do I move the wires?

Answer 1

If you are in the UK it is illegal to touch anything that is situated on the outside of the property up to the master socket. This is to prevent numpties from causing damage to the line and equipment back at the local exchange.

The best route would be to get a BT engineer out as they will do it correctly. If you attempt to do it yourself and s***w up be warned that any subsequent visit to your house by BT either to correct your error or for an upgrade or line check will land you in hot water and potentially with a huge repair bill plus a criminal record.

If you have an NTE5 master socket you can remove the front lower half of the face plate but that is it, providing it splits in 2 (you will see a line across the front if it does), and then you can join your wires to the corresponding points (IDCs) on the reverse.

Answer 2

connect all the red wires to the L1 red wires and all the green wires to the L1 green wires

Answer 3

If the L1 line had all the other outlets on it and that is the one you canceled and the L2 only had a single line on it, then just move the wires from the L1 connections to the L2 side. The L1 side is most likely the dead side.