sparkybird said:
My other half recently got us Broadband (he does seem to spend a lot of time on the internet.....
) Anyway, the provider (Tiscali) ...
Sorry you probably don't want to hear this but Tiscali are one of the poorer providers out there.
Here is a comparison with two other (mediocre) mass-market providers, and one other decent provider:
http://www.adslguide.org.uk/isps/compare.asp?aol=ON&bt=ON&plusnet=ON&tiscali=ON&cmp_action=Compare
You can always migrate to a decent provider when your 12 month contract is up. Just make sure you don't set yourself up with a Tiscali-based e-mail address because that is somewhat of a lobster-pot and you'll be lumbered with them forever. Instead get yourself a free e-mail account from someone like Gmail, Fastmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo.
sparkybird said:
... gave us these Z blocker DSL filters to plug in between the main phone sockets and the phone lines. We were told we had to do this on all phone sockets for broadband to work.
That is a simplified version of the truth. All of your telephones need to be (electrically) on the filtered side of a microfilter, one way or another. You must not have a telephone which doesn't have a microfilter (electrically) between it and the phone line. You don't need a microfilter on an unused socket, and you you are not limited to having only one phone on the filtered side of a microfilter. You can happily plug a doubler into a microfilter and plug two (or more) phones into it.
sparkybird said:
Two questions:
Is it possible to get phone sockets with these Z blocker things in them already as they are quite ugly and messing up my nice minimalist decor.
Yes.
http://www.adslnation.com/products/xtf.php
The XTF filters are different from other ones because they contain a really good active microfilter (with 2 transistors), the exact same circuit as used in the XF-1e microfilter.
(One thing to watch out for, the terminals on the XTF are labelled with British Standard numbering rather than BT numbering. These two numbering schemes are reversed with respect to each other; where one goes 1 to 6, the other goes 6 to 1. So where the XTF socket says LINE5 and LINE2 these should be connected to terminals 2 and 5 respecitively on a BT phone socket. The terminal marked NC should be wired to terminal 3 (the ringer wire) on the BT phone socket in case you want to make an onward unfiltered connection in the future. If you want to take a
filtered connection off to a standard BT phone socket then PHONE5, RING4 & PHONE2 should be wired to terminals 2, 3 & 5 respectively on the extension socket. If you want to take an
unfiltered connection to another socket, you should wire LINE5, NC & LINE2 to terminals 2, 3 & 5 respectively on the extension socket.)
I found that the XF-1e was the only microfilter which would allow Caller Display to work on my Philips DECT phone on my long (6km) exchange line. All other microfilters (even supposedly superior filters) failed to work.
Once you have an XTF socket, you can wire other extension sockets from the
filtered side of the socket. You then don't need to have a separate microfilter on those extensions, because the circuit to them is already filtered. (That also means you can't connect any ADSL equipment to those sockets, but that may well be what you want.)
sparkybird said:
My upstairs phone (an extension) doesn't work when plugged into the new Z blocker but I do get a ring tone when it's plugged in normally. Any ideas?
Substandard microfilter?
If you have a microfilter that looks like a bit like a BT socket doubler, i.e. the plug part of it is part of the body of the unit, then chances are it's not that great. It may work to a certain extent, and many people are perfectly happy with them, but many of them have significant design flaws which mean they won't work in many configurations which should be valid. Personally I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole.
Microfilters that look like a little box with a short bit of cable coming out of them are generally much better. As far as I can tell, the best one you can get is the XF-1e:
http://www.adslnation.com/products/xf-1e.php