hi all. I accidentally, and very stupidly, cut my phone line yesterday. What i'm left with is 7 wires. 4 white, 1 black, 1 green, 1 orange. It's a BT line. I was previously with VM & i've looked at that old connection for guidance. Not much help as on the VM line only two wires are connected and to two terminals A & B. Please help! Thank you.

where have you cut it?

there are normally only 2 connections on the incoming anyway & it doesn't matter which way round they are out of the two that are connected to it.

the cables you say are white will be white with colour markers on them like blue/orange etc.

It does matter as to which way around with older phones. Swapped and phones will not ring. Although they will work. With cordless phones and like you are correct it will not matter. Normally 50 volt DC on the two wires in use. It seems BT often use a multi-core and if one core fails they will change the core in use so one can't rely on colours.
Can't remember if 2 is pos and 5 neg or other way around. But if it will not ring swap them.

the white wires are solid white. I can't upload a pic. The photos i've taken are too big to be uploaded.

Also, the connector terminal has 6 wiring options. My old vm one has only 2, a and b.

picture

You only use terminals 2 and 5 if you take an extension then also 3 is used to make phones ring but it is still two wire at moment 2 and 5 only.

Likely only 2 of 4 wires shown are live. Although there is a colour code not always followed so if you have a meter on a range higher then 50vdc check if no meter then think there is only 9 options so just try until it works. Either way around you will get dialling tone. But if wrong phone may not ring.

Telephone wires come as twisted pairs so normally you only need to try each pair. Likely 7th is not a wire but some spacer and if you try and strip you will find it's just plastic. So three tries will give you right pair and one more try to see if right way around.

thanks for that Eric, it's obviously quite a long while since i connected them to the older ones, i had forgotten that.

now i think about it, i used to have to ring out to somebody, get them to ring me back to prove the ringing worked. that shows my age because it was pre-mobile phone days

Got it sorted. Thanks, guys.