Brand New BT I-Plate – Interstitial Plate – ADSL
Product Description
Solwise Description Standard domestic telephone wiring uses three wires to carry the signal between the master socket and the extensions. Two of these wires come from the outside and are connected directly to your local telephone exchange. The third wire is generated in your master socket and carries the ‘bell’ signal which is used to ring some old-fashioned telephones when someone calls you. If you have an ADSL service with each phone connected to a micro-filter then the bell-wire is completely redundant since a bell signal is generated in each micro-filter for the few phones which still need it. Now, unfortunately, this bell-wire tends to cause some degradation to the ADSL signal as it travels about your house. The Solwise solution to this problem would be to detach the front section of your master socket and disconnect the bell-wire(s) (from pin 3) and re-fit the faceplate. The BT solution is called the iPlate! This device places a filter on the bell-wire (which remember is not required!). (The best solution for ADSL wiring is based on a centralised master faceplate splitter such as our ADSL-NTEFACE models, please consider this option if you have ADSL signal quality issues.)
- BT Interstitial Filter
- Broadband Accelerator
My ‘up to 8.0 Mbps’ BT Anytime Broadband package performance has always been a little lacklustre. I live 2Km from my local telephone exchange, and I was achieving a maximum of 2.9 Mbps during large file downloads. This is certainly usable, but the ADSL standard theoretically supports up to 8.0 Mbps at 2Km range under ideal conditions. I recently heard about the BT i-Plate, and its ability to improve the quality of signal on remote telephone sockets by filtering the ‘bell’ wire on the master socket. I have to admit to being somewhat skeptical, but given its minimal price, I thought there wasn’t much to risk by buying an i-Plate. Well I did so, and after fitting it (which took literally 2 minutes with the aid of a small, flat-bladed screwdriver) my maximum download peak speed instantly went from 2.9 Mbps up to 4.2 Mbps. I certainly wasn’t expecting such a dramatic improvement, but I’m very pleased I decided to try it, and would recommend that anyone who can make use of the i-Plate try one. Note that there are some who won’t benefit, depending on the type of master socket you have (later ones already have the technology integrated) and whether or not you connect your ADSL router to the master socket (it will apparently only help if connected to a remote socket) so check the BT website for full details before purchasing. Highly recommended!
Rating: 5 / 5
Bought this about two weeks and seen almost 2mb speed increase well worth the money recommended…
Rating: 5 / 5
It took about a couple of minutes to fit this, all you need is a screwdriver.
My old broadband speed was a maximum of 1mb. 36 hours after fitting this I’m getting a reliable 1.3mb
Bewarned though that the speed increase isn’t instantly available. Your line often has an IP Profile and this needs to be increased (something done automatically) to see the increase. Mine took 24 hours.
Rating: 5 / 5
I installed this to try and get a more stable termination on our DSL line, service provided by o2 over BT copper. We have recently moved house to somewhere that is quite a way from the exchange and were only getting 1.2MB/s downstream and 256kb/s up (despite o2 telling me we would get approx 3 meg).
Just before I bought this I rewired the house and replaced all the old nasty BT cable with nice quality modern cable – I also removed the ringer wire from ‘pin 3′ on the NTE5 and to all of the extensions as modern phones just don’t need it. I also rang o2 and asked them if they could ‘turn the wick up’ on my DSL – which they promptly did. Suddenly my Netgear router was giving me 2.7Mb/s – much more like it.
I bought the Iplate to see if we could get any further improvement, and should have done a little more homework on what this box actually does. Basically it isolates the ringer wire from the cabling, to stop crosstalk from that wire affecting the sensitive DSL signals on the voice pair… as I had already done this the Iplate didn’t help much – except that actually my speed went down!! Not only that but since we installed it our DECT phones sometimes refuse to ring at all.
As a result I have removed the iplate and gone back to a vanilla NTE5 with no ringer wire. All is back to normal and the speed has crept back to nearly 3Mb/s.
I would therefore ONLY buy this if you know your wiring is old and includes a ringer wire which may affect your DSL – if you have newer wiring it is not likely to make any difference. It is not a universal panacea – as usual the laws of physics always apply!
Rating: 3 / 5
easy to fit worth it just for the fact it will bring your socket up to date and may give you more speed it worked for me !
Rating: 5 / 5