Major outage

My BT ADSL service disappeared about 28 hours ago. My next door neighbour still has his service. I can get no information out of BT. Technical support just read from the service status report that is freely available on their website. The line synchs at its normal 8128/448 speeds but the router won't connect.

Businesses go bankrupt very quickly when this sort of thing happens. I have used BT for many years and never had more than half an hour of downtime before. That's tolerable. But 28 hours with no explanations whatsoever and no timescale for a fix is outrageous.

I am 12 miles from the exchange they are blaming for the problem, which is in Torquay!

So what should I do?

"The line synchs at its normal 8128/448 speeds but the router won't connect"

"I am 12 miles from the exchange they are blaming for the problem, which is in Torquay"

One of those statements is likely to be untrue!

Have you tried leaving the router disconnected , preferably overnight?

Its possible the line card has malfunctioned or BT has messed up configuration somewhere (suprise)... for all their faults they rarely have major outtages for that long without something being done and as your neighbour is ok sounds like its a problem with something related to your account.

My (Belkin) router reports that the ADSL status is "UP". The exchange mentioned in their status report is 12 miles from me. I have no bb service. My own exchange is also 01803 but is about 300 metres from my house. I have disconnected the router, but not for as long as 24 hours. I would have thought that my router would recover from any problems following a power cycle. I do not understand why it might need hours of disconnection to get better.

My neighbour still has service. Different ISP but not LLU.

BT say the problem is being worked on by engineers and won't give me any more information. I completely fail to understand why they haven't routed round the problem. After all, it is now 30 hours since I lost connectivity.

In reply to a post by rogan8:

"The line synchs at its normal 8128/448 speeds but the router won't connect"

"I am 12 miles from the exchange they are blaming for the problem, which is in Torquay"

One of those statements is likely to be untrue!

Have you tried leaving the router disconnected , preferably overnight?

I suspect you're right, but I can't get through to anyone who will do anything other than read from their script. They won't take me seriously until the fault they are working on is fixed. As far as they are concerned, a known problem in a distant exchange is sufficient explanation for my personal outage. I imagine/hope that if my problem continues once they have resolved the problem they know about, then they might take me a bit more seriously.

In reply to a post by Rroff:

Its possible the line card has malfunctioned or BT has messed up configuration somewhere (suprise)... for all their faults they rarely have major outtages for that long without something being done and as your neighbour is ok sounds like its a problem with something related to your account.

Ah, I misunderstood.
BT originally connected many exchanges to ADSL using sub-tending, basically piggy backing a `smaller' exchnage off a larger one. It maybe that your exchange is the satellite exchange , subtended from the `larger' home exchange.
It maybe that your connection session has become `stale' either as a result of the network fault or some other factor. It may release if you power down the router for a period of time, Overnight would be plenty if that is to resolve it, but an hour maybe enough if that is the cure .

Anything over 10 minutes should be enough for this purpose - no need to do it overnight.

There's a very polite script monkey working on the problem right now. She doesn't listen very well!

The outage report has disappeared from the recorded message and has been deleted from the service status page - they don't even claim that it has been fixed. Perhaps it was a figment of my imagination.

Aha! 44 hours after I lost my service they are now taking me seriously and will escalate it! I explained that as it has already been 44 hours that I expect my problem to be treated as a matter of urgency. Which would be nice.

In reply to a post by Rroff:

Anything over 10 minutes should be enough for this purpose - no need to do it overnight.

Zen used to recommend at least 30 mins in the case of a "Stale Session". 10 Minutes might not be enough depending on the installed exchange equipment / session timeout settings.