In reply to a post by Oliver341:

(minor edit to my previous post)

Feeling a bit touchy myself as well, 'cos of things happening at home. Sorry I snapped at you.

The grim weather doesn't help much either.

I've just deleted an email from Quickline (I'm not even a customer) that basically was an apology and outline of the problem that occurred last night and that things were back to normal.Seems there was a major fire in Coventry that destroyed a fibre cable.
Quickline
Yesterday at 10:35 · Kingston upon Hull ·
*****NOTICE*****
There is a major outage affecting part of the Quickline network and other providers due to a fire affecting a core fibre. We are experiencing an unprecedented amount of calls at the moment, please accept our apologies and be assured we will get back to you as soon as we can.
Source Quickline

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

The grim weather doesn't help much either.

That grim weather dropped our connection 5 times tonight and 3 of those we lost our phone line as well.

I cannot report these faults due to they are all down to the intermittent line fault we have had for the last few years, and I don't want to be lumbered a bill for BT Openreach to come out (when its no longer windy or rainy and say "sorry no faults detected" etc.

Seems ok now though.

Paul

In reply to a post by PaulKirby:

I cannot report these faults due to they are all down to the intermittent line fault we have had for the last few years, and I don't want to be lumbered a bill for BT Openreach to come out (when its no longer windy or rainy and say "sorry no faults detected" etc.

Same for us too. Our line which previously pulled 20Mbps has dropped to a record low of under 2Mbps.

It's a good question. How do you actually prove that an intermittent line fault is re-occurring in stormy weather?
Audio record the crackling phone line?
Video the modem stats page showing sync dropping over and over?
Show the connect speed being slashed by 90%?

Whatever the proof you offered Openreach may still write it off as due to customer wiring.

The same questions are being asked on the TalkTalk forum.

When BTOpenreach deals with intermittent faults, is it more sympathetic towards customers of BT Group (e.g. BTRetail and Plusnet) than it is towards rival LLU customers?

For BT Group customers, instead of recording a No Fault Found which generates a £130 charge for the end-user, note it down as "an intermittent fault identified; cause not located."

Subtly providing a two-tier fault repair system that:

(a) boosts BT Group coffers through NFF call-out charges; and
(b) leaves LLU customer frustrated with his rival telco; and more likely to migrate.
(c) creates illusion of better service for BT Group customers

I've had routing problems for 2 days and I'm not anywhere near the areas effected by this outage listed on the BT status page. A traceroute shows 53% packet loss at the exit point ( 31.55.187.212 ) from the BT network ( I am aware that this may be as a result of something giving pings a low priority). Various USA sites and Facebook ( UK servers...) are very slow to load with missing sections, other UK hosted sites seem to be OK. I did, against my better judgement as I tend to leave well alone, try to force a different route with a resynch to no avail.

Is there some other wider problem?

This is true.

*** start of long story ***
A few years back (before moving over to BT) I did a complete rewire of our entire phone line in our house from the BT80B Junction Box in our house to "our" NTE5A Master Socket (I say our due to I brought this) and from there to all rooms that needed a phone line for like a SkyHD Box etc.

Now we moved over to BT and was all working fine until we had a very bad thunder storm and several lines on our pole lost their whole line.
Now get this BT, sent an engineer over, looked at our wiring which was using the correct standard cable, was kept very short between the BT80B box and the NTE5A Master Box used a Openreach MKII ADSL Filer to isolate the phones from the broadband, all my cables was all under the floor out of the way.
You would think ok, nothing wrong there, wrong, this guy had no clue what he was doing, now we have 2 BT80A boxes due to he was too lazy to install cables in our house like I had it so he tacked it under the carpet where people walk over, now since then it has cracked the outer screen of the cable and every time an engineer comes round they all go tut, this will cost you, where I say no it [censored] wont you lot did that wiring.

So from with my wiring we got a sync rate of 7.241Mbps down to their wiring and now only get a sync rate of approx. 6.4Mbps (if we are lucky)

So as for the £130 charge, we just refused to pay it due to one of their engineers did that wiring, I just point them to my old cable that is still there under the floor and that was the last we heard of the charge.
Now the last BT Engineer (not a 3rd party contractor) that came round did in fact take a look at our old wire that I had installed and said, why was that cable disconnected, so I told them, he just laughed and connected it back up as much as he could, sadly that first engineer cut a big chunk of my cable to use, so we are still lumped with two BT80A boxes, but the engineers seem to be happy when they see it and no charge has been mentioned since.

This didn't resolve the loss in speed, and we still run the risk of being charged if we report intermittent faults, which is why we just put up with them.

*** end of long story ***

This is why we are hoping to get everything moved over to fibre when they get around to do our FTTP.

Paul

Interesting if all too familiar story, Paul. If there's one thing BT linesmen are good at it then it's bodging. And if there's a chance to bill us suckers for "normalising" consumer wiring, then it's an opportunity not to be missed. Probably brownie points in it for them!Almost makes you want to hire a cherry-picker to reach the top of the pole, and do the job properly yourself. It's not all about laziness though. There's always a manager horsewhipping his hapless linesmen. Ordering them to wind-up at one job, whether finished or not, and move swiftly onto the next one.

At some point you've got to pull the carpets up (yet again), remove all that poorly-laid and damaged (BT) wiring and do the job properly yourself?

In reply to a post by edwincluck:

Interesting if all too familiar story, Paul. If there's one thing BT linesmen are good at it then it's bodging. And if there's a chance to bill us suckers for "normalising" consumer wiring, then it's an opportunity not to be missed. Probably brownie points in it for them!Almost makes you want to hire a cherry-picker to reach the top of the pole, and do the job properly yourself. It's not all about laziness though. There's always a manager horsewhipping his hapless linesmen. Ordering them to wind-up at one job, whether finished or not, and move swiftly onto the next one.

This is true, but we have had some good engineers do repairs on our line, but its the few that seems to mess things up.

In reply to a post by edwincluck:

At some point you've got to pull the carpets up (yet again), remove all that poorly-laid and damaged (BT) wiring and do the job properly yourself?

Yeah, I was thinking that the other week, but was holding off the re-wiring due to I was thinking of installing a new BT80B (small white junction box) and new NTE5A along with the MKIII Filter face plate upstairs at the front of the house.

And when they come to finish off our fibre install which has been projected to be ready end of November (BT's Head of parliamentary affairs) and I was thinking of also having FVA installed as well at the same time.

And those new two boxes that I have installed would be used for that, and if all goes well, I was hoping to have them move the copper line to that new BT80B, change the face plate to the Copper / Fibre one and I will just remove the old ones and link our internal new wiring to that new NTE5A box.

But that's depending on the projected date my local MP was told is correct.

Paul