All I’m saying is…

[bslsimes]

Originally published at simes dot org. You can comment here or there.

If I were designing a house which had quite a narrow front hall, I wouldn’t put the telephone master socket right by the front door, where nobody in their right mind would want to have a telephone, thus rendering it COMPLETELY USELESS.

Comments

[knell]

If the house is anything like 20 years old or more, that's because the master socket was put where the old GPO junction box was (probably with the phone on a small table or shelf next to the front door). I believe you got charged a lot more if you wanted the phone wiring to go much further than your front door. Then the BT line jack came along in about 1985 or so and self-fitted extensions made it easier to put phones in interesting places, but the master socket stayed where the little oval junction box had been.

Of course, the latter brought with it the enormous amounts of crappy DIY phone wiring you see in most houses now - our current place was *particularly* special as the former occupants had split the BT line before the master socket and installed a second master socket in parallel with presumably hilarious results for the line impedance (and before I found it, correspondingly hilarious results for rate-adaptive DSL speed negotiation).

[bslsimes]

No, this house is nothing like 20 years old. It's just plain stupidity, I'm afraid.