Strange BT sockets arrangement

I have recently bought a house and found out this strange BT socket arrangement/wiring (at least from me).

The BT wires come from the outside world from the left wall in the image attached. This wire then goes into a rectangular box (a sort of splitter) which creates 2 wires, one going to the standard BT socket above the splitter and the other one going to the right towards another BT (extension) socket in another room.

I was expecting all the houses to have a master socket as main point to which all the other extension sockets would connect to.

When plugging a phone into the socket in the other room, I hear a dialling tone, whereas when plugging the phone into the socket in the picture attached, I hear nothing, all mute. I guess the wiring in the rectangular box may have something wrong, but was just wondering why I do not have a wire from the external world into a main socket.

Thanks!

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I wonder what was fixed to those two screw holes in the wall below the NTE? Could there have been two lines there at one time, with the non-functioning NTE part of the second installation?

2 lines into one house? Why would one want that? I thought you could do everything with 1 line only, these days. Also, I would see no point in paying for 2 lines... Dunno.

nbr said:

2 lines into one house? Why would one want that? I thought you could do everything with 1 line only, these days.

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You've pretty much answered your own question. In these days of broadband and voip it's pretty unusual (but not unheared of) to have a requirement for multiple lines in one house. OTOH 10 years ago if you wanted a dedicated line/number for buisness or you wanted to access the internet without blocking up your main phone line you needed two lines (or ISDN but for some stupid reason BT made that more expensive than two conventional analog lines).

Having two seperate phone lines is more common than you may think. People working at home wanting a seperate line with a seperate bill for example, often paid for by their company.

While you can use a single line for many things these days, you cannot keep billing seperate.

ISDN is marginally more than two PSTN lines, but you get a far greater service with more features......and if you look elsewhere, you will find it VERY competatively priced.

Before Virgin had broadband we had 2 phone lines to run dial up.
JonB