line problems.

A mate of mine have a problem with his phone line, his sync speed keeps going up and down, seems like it changes with the weather. He phoned Bt broadband and they don't want to know, He needs someone to sort out the line outside, so what is his next step?



Adrian

If he's sure it's the line outside (from pole to house, "drop wire"), and it's not affecting the voice, he needs his ISP to book an engineer visit.

Beware. If the fault is not on the BT network (eg, house wiring, dodgy kit), they may be asked to pay for the visit.

If there is a noise problem with the voice side, book it as a voice fault and don't mention broadband.

thanks for the quick reply.

He is with Bt broadband, no problem with voice. this have been happening for a few years now, he went onto Bt, because he thought it would work better, I told him it was his line and not the ISp. The sync changes like the wind, he thought it was Plusnet when he was on there, even after I explained that plusnet can't do anything about the sync speed and it would be the same with what ever ISP he went with.


The router, which is a BT Hub was connected directly to the main phone socket, There is no test socket, so he can't use that. We disconnected all extensions and still have the same problem, so I take it that the line is at fault.

The thought of them asking to be paid is wha is putting him off, but I think he should do it and then argue about the payment after.


The lines around here are so old, mine was suppose to have been replaced 8 years ago, but never was.


Adrian

If you've done all the sensible diagnositcs, then there's really nothing left to be done except getting an engineer out. Again, if you're sure the fault isn't in the property, how could you be charged?

If you can, it would be worth using something like routerstats to keep some traces of the line conditions, and you can maybe use these to help convince the engineer to investigate a bit deepr than "it syncs, what's the problem?"

Yeah I would get some better diagnostics than just the sync goes up and down, what speeds is he receiving when the sync is good, when its bad etc.

You could end up getting Openreach out and they will say thats normal, when my sync went up and down it could go from 5000k down to 500k. You also need to be experiencing the problem when Openreach come out, I had Openreach out countless times and each time they found no fault until one day somebody was monitoring my line from the exchange and found something again that yielded no results though. It wasn't until they got a specialist team out to the exchange to look at "every inch" of my line within the exchange. One lift and shift later and the problem was solved.

I'm not suggesting a lift and shift could solve your friends problem as each fault is different.