Can Digital Voice work with this wiring?

[pddco]

@HHGTTG @john-tejada  

Be mindful that it’s much easier / more forgiving to run an Ethernet cable - it’s an 1Gb port on the ONT -  around the house from the ONT to the hub. Yes, if indeed the engineer is able and willing, there can be a longer run of internal fibre from the CSP to the ONT. But with a bend radius of a £2 coin it can be tricky, if not unsightly, going round door frames, external corners and such like.  

Better to try and find a better drop for the OH feed if you can?  Maybe the OH bracket on the house securing the cable from the pole could be moved somewhere more convenient for the CSP? 

And also, remember you don’t need to have the hub near the phone. There are workarounds either using the DECT adapter thing. Or hardwiring the hub phone socket to your existing phone wiring. 

[HHGTTG]

@pddco 

Thanks. I concur with all you have said and know that the phone does not have necessarily be plugged into the hub. 

[john-tejada]

Thanks @pddco . That's a really helpful point on the bend radius.

I'll have a think about OH feed options, although I think they are limited owing to the unusual quirks of the split-level property. But I'll check next time I visit.

The (lack of) power supply is the main problem for my mother's installation, so it is the physical location of the ONT that I would like to influence. Given my thinking is that I can run the fibre cable into the propertly directly into the space under the floorboards, and then run it about 6 - 8 metres through that void to where it would then go up through the floorboards into the house. So, the internal fibre cable would be hidden entirely from view (and can be as messy as it likes) until a short length pops straight up through the floorboad by the skirting board directly into the wall-mounted ONT. That's my idealistic view anyway (although I do think it makes the most sense)!

[pddco]

@john-tejada 

Ah, running under the floor in the void got me thinking. A chap I know wanted his internal fibre to run from the downstairs front wall where the CSP would be located, to his upper floor back office. It is a timber framed house with partition walls. Before the engineer arrived he ran some hosepipe ( with a drawstring inside) in the voids of the partitions up into the loft and then down into the office. When the engineer arrived he simply pulled the internal fibre through the hosepipe from the CSP position into the office where the hose came out flush with the wall. And the ONT was mounted beside it. 

Could a hose pipe route work for you? You could do the route beforehand and the OR engineer would just simply need to pull the fibre through.

[john-tejada]

@pddco 

That's an ingenious trick!

As much as I enjoy arranging wires, cables, etc. (i.e. my diagrams on the first page), running a hosepipe as a conduit would be overkill. Because I have easy access to the entire void, I can be sitting there on the other side of the wall (underneath the room in question), and when the engineer feeds through the fibre cable, I can help pull enough through, then shuffle over a few metres to pass it up through the floorboard. That will take all of about 20 seconds I think. Quicker than the time it would take the engineer to then walk into the house over to the cable entry point.

[john-tejada]

Just to conclude this thread, the BT engineer was happy with running the cable under the floorboards, and it all worked out ok.

In advance, I’d drilled a small hole in the floorboards (8 mm was plenty). When he arrived, I explained the plan, and he was fine with it. He had a choice of pre-cut cable lengths (10m or 20m) with a plug for the ONT at one end and bare wire at the other. By my measurements, 10m would have been enough (the run was about 7.5m based on a trial with string), but he chose 20m to be safe. That was more than enough. He fed the bare end of the cable through the hole in the floorboard, while I pulled it through from the crawl space underneath, and then fed it through the wall via an air vent. He drew it through to the CSP, while leaving enough slack for me to tidy it up underneath.

Next, he replaced the cable from the telegraph pole to the anchor point by the roof, then finished the run down to the CSP. Because the line of sight to the pole was obscured by a tree that had grown a lot since the original copper line was fitted, he had to call in another engineer to help. He had a choice of 30m and 60m pre-cut cables and went with 60m, and that was again plenty.

Once everything was connected, it all worked perfectly. I then tidied up the internal wiring by removing redundant sections, simplifying the layout, and adding a splitter to the back of the BT Smart Hub 2 to feed the extension phone.