BT Broadband Woes

[Norman Verona]

May I suggest we stop speculating and giving, what to Stephen, is highly technical advice.

 

He pays his money, the product doesn't work as it should. The man comes round and fixes it.

 

Simple.

 

Sorry if that offends anyone, it's not meant to.

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

Sorry if it offends Norman, but from experience that's not how the might of BT often works either. Because it is such a technical field, BT, (not the engineers particularly, most Ive dealt with are OK), tend to simply push blame on to someone else and close the case. UNLESS you can pin them down to some extent and get THEM to investigate further.

 

Starting the communication by listing the things you've investigated, which coincidentally are the the things they will try and get you to go away and do, has in previous dealings, been a very effective way of ensuring you're not just given the run around.

[Norman Verona]

Dave, I've been dealing with BT on comms for 30 years. Yes, it depends on the engineer. However the best results I got was when I just tried to be helpful and nice (I can be quite a charmer if I have to) and acted dumb. 

 

Every time they wanted me to check and test something else I asked them to hang on while I checked with our office, I didn't actually talk to anyone but HM and then said, "Yes that's been checked". 

 

The engineer would then phone HIS tech support number and go a step further.

 

When I did let on I knew about these things I was dealt with as if I should be able to sort it out myself.

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

Ah, I can only claim twenty years    That's why we employ a telecoms engineer!

 

Seriously though, if you basically just admited what I was saying, except you've added the delay of waiting them to suggest it, while you already know that bits OK. If you can already confirm with them your side is OK, they don't have a vast amount of choice, they can't ask you to go in to their side of the master sockets now can they!

[Norman Verona]

Dave, when I was doing all this stuff we were using modems and multiplexors.

If the engineer thought you knew about this stuff they would ask you to carry out lots of checks. You couldn't refuse as you were an "expert". If I just stood there and acted dumb, not difficult, they would go through their tests and then toddle off to fix the fault, which was usually a bad connection.

Worst case I had was a dealer in Bournemouth who had the showroom on one side of the side road and parts on the other. We used line drivers to run the 3 screens and printer. Problem was there was a minicab office 3 doors down and they were transmitting about 100 times the maximum strength. Every time they keyed up it wiped out the data. We only found out after converting it to a far more expensive line and mux.

[FILFAN]

Think alot of the trouble Norman is that bt use to be a job for life with great benefits and the engineers would take pride in their work.

Now all the engineers are treated like crap, have no job security, constantly pushed and given stupid timescales. To put it politely they don't give a flying monkeys. If they can go to your home and close the job off one way of another they are happy. Most of the skilled ones I know are just hanging in there until they can retire

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

We used to generally be ISDN with some POTS, both voice and data, now we're mainly VOIP and data generally over some form of broadband with mini al POTS.

 

Biggest issue at the moment is getting Panasonic SIP servers to be fully compatible with some of our other gear, (Crestron automation systems), fortunately Panasonic have picked up on this and seem keen to work with us to develop a compatible system.

 

The point with Stephen though, was that he doesn't have a complex IT infrastructure  of the sort you describe, so they can't pass the buck to far on his side.

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

Very sad to add a "like this" to Filfan's post, but that's been exactly our experience for the past few years. Though there are a few good guys still in the system, they're a dying breed.

[Norman Verona]

I know about BT and the way it's treated it's engineering staff (and probably everyone else)

 

A friend fell on his feet when he got fed up with BT and left. Applied for a few jobs and got one with South Yorkshire Police managing their telecomms.

 

The point I make is that Stephen should just stand there and say it used to work it no longer works, I haven't a clue about these things, I'm a banker/accountant/vet/doctor/brothel keeper/hairy arsed builder, whatever. Nothing's changed here so can you make it work please.

 

In my view once you show knowledge they say you've been "messing" and it's all your fault.

 

 

 

ed to add that we can discuss this forever and a day, it's entertaining but not helping Stephen. He will do as he sees fit and I wish him, whatever he does, the best of luck getting it fixed.

[ACW]

Stephen

 

Assuming nothing else has changed the problem is most likely to be a fault with the pair from the exchange. you might have a dry join and earth or battery fault or even a partial short. The engineer will often want to do the simplest thing to complete the job and move onto the next job to keep his targets. However a lift and shift they will swap part or all of the line from exchange to house with a fresh pair. Usually the re-making of joints is the main fix. We will always insist on a lift and shift for a recurring broadband fault that doesnt point to local cabling, equipment or filters.

 

Because you loose the line on an incoming call this is always filters or cabling IME. You might want to swap the filters and make sure you have one on every phone in the house.

 

HTH,

 

ACW.

[Nick PC]

The engineer from Open reach did a really good job on mine, without me asking re-routed my line and by doing so took out a significant amount of copper wire. When I moved to Infinity I got it at max speed whereas neighbour was far slower. Does depend who turns up but they can make a significant change.

[Paul Edden]

We had all sorts of problems with BT Broadband at our office building - it would drop out / go to very low speeds at wierd times of the day.  BT came along (eventually) - investigated the wiring, changed the pair, routed the overhead wire to the building via another telegraph pole at the rear of building, renewed the cable internally - nothing.

 

Rather laughably looking back - the problem stemed from someone in one of the upstairs offices was using a very old CRT type PC monitor - and when they turned it on, it created so much radio interference that it knocked our broadband out.  When they turned it off - bingo - broadband ok again.  It took a "BT RAIN Engineer" to sort that one out.

 

I "donated" a spare LCD screen to the old goat upstairs (who does a fair impression of scrooge) and have not had a problem since.

 

Check out what your neighbours are using - I have another spare LCD screen if you want it Stephen..

[stephenh]

Got a phone call from India yesterday evening to say due to the storms on saturday night/sunday morning all the engineers were out repairing lines, and would I agree to the appointment being cancelled? If not, the engineer wouldn't be able to come anyway because of a backlog of work caused by the storms! and further, the work they were doing following the storms would most likely cure our problems anyway!

Where do BT find these people from? Well, don't answer that, I know the answer is from India, but really, what is the logic in what they are saying. Anyway, I'm now keeping a log of all these calls, and of any fault with the service. However, since I gave them a "rocket" last week, it seems to be much better. Probably just co-incidence.

[Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman]

Nope, "fixed by 'phone-call" is our nick name for it! You speak to them, they repeatedly swear blind it's not them, they didn't do it and you can't prove anything! Usually tell you its a fault elsewhere etc.

 

Then anywhere from part way through the call to shortly after you've hung up, the fault rectify's itself, mysteriously.

 

It was funny, during the early broadband adoption days when we often had to set clients up and deal with the BT part of the switchover a lot. My business partner found one of his old school mates working at management level for BT in the NW with responsibility for support/maintenance.

 

He used to reckon that half the proble was the support people you spoke to not understanding how to work their own computer system. Quite a few times these "fixed by phone call" issues were where the operator would look at the settings, see they were all correct and do nothing. Not realising that there was some kind of final compile and/or send to machine type "button" to press, so the configuration would be done, just not updated to the exchange equipment!

[stephenh]

Well the engineer has been this pm.

As luck would have it, having worked fairly ok in recent days, today it has been hopeless, and when the engineer called the broadband was down completely.

Anyway, he's put some sort of filter on to replace the standard one I had before, which will help to mitigate external electromagnetic interference and will prevent the possibility of interference from our extention phones.

He has also changed our connection between the green box down the road and the main exchange (I'm guessing this was the lift and shift which Addie recommended). From there, our service goes to a pole at the bottom of our drive, and then in common with several of our neighbours to our house by overhead line. He was going to change the connection from the green box to the pole, but unfortunately wasn't allowed to climb the pole with his ladder as it hasn't been checked for safety recently. He would have done it with a cherry picker, but one wasn't available this afternoon. However, we now have an appreciably faster broadband speed, and he monitored it with his equpment for quite some time, and couldn't detect any drop off in performance. I gathered they have been monitoring our line performance for some weeks now, and he acknowledged it has been up and down like a yoh-yoh lately.

He said if we do have any further trouble, to ring at any time of day or night, and they will get an engineer with a cherry picker to replace the remainder of the connection to our house.

So, as I say, "job's a good'n!" At last they have taken our problems seriously.