Advice re fault

Hi.
A storm went over my area saturday lunchtime causing a short power outage. Following this my broadband is out. Home Hub 5 glows a solid orange line with none of the symbols highlighted. White fibre box Gren light to all with DSL blinking (occasionally stopping then blinking again.) Done the whole turn off reset with no avail. Replaced the HH5 with previous HH3, same result. I noticed on NETstatus website an area close to me indicates infinity problem with begining telephone code matching mine. I contacted BT via chat and after diagnostics the bloke comfirmed a fault and advised I would be contacted in 48hours. Almost immeadietley got a call to arrange a time for an engineer to attend on Tuesday. Also got an email from BT apologising for the inconvenience. At no time however was any charge or possible charge mentioned. Does this mean the fault must lie with BT and they are comming to sort it? I have heard of people being charge quite a high fee for an engineer callout. I have not replaced the White fibre box to rule out it as defective. I would hate to get an extorionate/ unnecessary bill simply to replace an item I could get off ebay and connect myself. Any thoughts regards the above. Thanks in advance.

Try plugging the phone line into the HH5 instead of the modem.

Im not home at present but will do when I get there. Your suggestion got me googling to see why you may be suggesting this. I didn't know HH5 has a built in modem... so learning something new already! Will HH5 effectively "plug&play" with the outreach modem gone or will it need configured?

Hmmmm. Why didn't the BT chat line assistant ask me to do this?

Because frontline support aren't that highly trained.

They have a script for the setup that the engineer installed, and probably don't even know your HH5 has a modem. (As opposed to the users who are only given one, without the white box, which is a modem).

You plug the phone line into the DSL port of the HH5 of course, not the WAN port that the white box feeds. To be absolutely clear, the cable that goes from the phone socket to the modem stays in rather same "phone"/DSL socket and the modem end of it into the HH DSL.

Yes it will Plug'n'Play.

It's very possible the engineer won't come to the house. If it is a fault in the Openreach network, fixing it may fix it for all those affected.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 30-Nov-15 09:18:58)

Internet was still down when I got home. Disconnected Openreach modem and plugged straight into HH5. Internet now back up and running.. so thanks to broadband forum again. I will now cancel the engineer. I still think the chat line assistant could of suggested this. I did tell him I was running HH5 and tried my HH3 to rule out HH5 being defective. He then asked me if I had a white box and I explained to him I did and what it was doing. He never mentioned I didn't need it if I have HH5. When I switched from Plusnet back to BT recently, this was never really explained to me either.

But does the Openreach modem work again now as well?

No it does not. I had to reset HH5 to get it running by itself with internet working fine. I then reconnected Openreach modem back up and reset both but defaulted to solid orange bar and green openreach dsl light flashing and internet again not working. Reconnceted HH5 by itself and internet fine. So the lightening that tripped the power must have fried my Openreach modem. I was fortunate I still had it connected because it must have took the hit instead of HH5!

Score: Thinkbroadband 1 : BT Diagnostics 0

I wonder which way BT will look at it. You guys have solved a problem for them or you guys have done them out out easy money??

A big thanks from me though.