Three days, three evening outages

Just thought I'd vent a little as I'm now on the third evening of disruption to my previously excellent connection. The first two nights I had outages with no DSL sync but now on the third night I had sync but no ppp session. The first two resolved overnight and the latest in an hour (although the upload has dropped down to the normal 440 rather than the uncapped 1mb that it has been up til now.

The connection has been fine during the day and no changes have been made to anything within my control.

I duly waited 30 mins the first night to log the ticket (at least it's an 0800 number) and do find having the status website interesting, for instance it was just showing a call waiting for over an hour, so no point phoning now to chase! Our servicedesk manager would loose his mind to have a call waiting for that long as it'll ruin his stats! (Interestingly there is no publication of the abandoned call rate, probably don't want to say how many give up)

Unfortunately I'm just waiting for a response, I dare not respond to the ticket for fear of pushing it further down their ever growing pile, as I believe from others that just responding effectively resets the timer (i don't know any other helpdesk software whose SLA timers reset when a ticket is updated)

The suggestion from the helpdesk was to plug the router into the master socket, or the test socket. Unfortunately my master socket is the old 1980s socket with no test socket and is located in the kitchen, well away from the networked computers. I'm hoping to arrange for BT to move the socket to a new location along with a modern face plate, just need to save up.

I know they are likely waiting on someone to do some investigation but it would at least be nice for someone to post an update from the ticket, rather than the, oh you'll have to now wait 24-72 hours for an update - the joys of residential broadband I suppose!

Hopefully it'll all just magically resolve itself!

It may be worth while you have the connection looking around at say AAISP (Andrews & Arnold) who will list any exchange level issues with the BT Wholesale network.

Failing that double check no-one has just switched on a Las Vegas strips worth of Christmas lights nearby

Just so you don't feel lonely, we lost our connection last night around 11.15. It's back OK this morning though. Not sure if it has been out on previous evenings as we haven't been home.

Well support have come back to say that they have made a change to the line profile as some setting is too low and it will now have to go through the training period again.

Strange that settings which have been in place for montsh are now suddenly wrong, but I suppose the cold weather is affecting the line.

If only I could understand half of the information that they gave regarding the tests, but I can at least understand the pretty picture showing the disconnects and reconnects including some that I wasn't aware of.

Fingers crossed this will stabilise it, well until I can get the master socket moved and FTTC

and if you use RSS then it's worth including their feed for updates: http://status.aaisp.net.uk/atom.cgi

You are not alone, I had an outage around 10-11pm on Friday night, Plusnet service status page had some entries regarding it:

16/11/2013 @ 11:39

This is an update to last night's post about the loss of connectivity affecting some of our broadband customers.

The problem has been attributed to a major BT Wholesale outage. Whilst customers are able to reconnect, the network is significantly out of balance which may cause performance issues as we enter the peak time period.

If you're having difficulties getting online then we suggest you log into your router and try connecting manually from the settings pages.

Kind regards,

Bob Pullen
Customer Support.

15/11/2013 @ 23:48

We're receiving an increased volume of calls from customers who were disconnected from the Internet at around 10:45pm. Those disconnected appear to be able to reconnect, however we're as yet unsure of the cause.

If you're having difficulties getting online then we suggest you log into your router and try connecting manually from the settings pages.

Our engineers are investigating and we'll provide another update tomorrow morning.

Kind regards,

Bob Pullen
Customer Support.

https://portal.plus.net/supportpages.html?a=2

Hope that does the trick for you, let me know how you get on or if you need anything updating/explaining.