Fixed, thanks !

So, 17070 reported the correct number but ringback did not ring our line and calls to our number were being answered by another confused local resident.

I eventually managed to talk to the other person and our stories matched in that they were receiving our calls.

BT's 'contractor' (who I assume is Openreach) finally came and assessed the problem on Wednesday and by the evening the lines were no longer crossed so we were able to get our own calls. I was informed that the broadband issue required additional equipment and I will get a further update tomorrow. Unfortunately I missed this call so I was not able to ask why they didn't just put me on ADSL in the meantime.

The upshot is I have now been offline for a week (hence the few updates here) and had no incoming calls for most of that week. I have no idea if there is any chance I will get broadband back in the near future but if we are waiting for capacity on the DSLAM then I suspect it could be many weeks. It took years for them to take the order so if it is full again why should I expect it to be less than years? What I really can't understand is why they opened orders to take mine and then closed them again, did capacity really come free and if so why wasn't it assigned to the person whose order they took? If not, have they not carried out a fraud to get my business?

On the positive side it did force me into looking at other options and I have been able to find a weak BT-WiFi signal by placing a laptop on top of a wardrobe. This is on an old laptop running Ubuntu so I have been able to attached an old Fon hotspot box to re-radiate that signal through the house. It sort of works but the bandwidth is very poor and it keeps going off and needing to be reconnected.

Possibly the last port or ports were found to be faulty , either on the card or more likely on the tie pairs, and waiting rectification

In reply to a post by andyhurley:

Does any of this sound familiar

Very familiar. We reluctantly migrated a residential line to BT VDSL2, from TalkTalk LLU ADSL2+. From start to finish, the process was a complete pig's ear.

Migrating reluctantly because TalkTalk said it could not, for the foreseeable future, offer us FTTC. Due to the punitive cost of £2,000+vat which Openreach charges other telcos for every GEA CableLink. These trivial cables, worth just a quid or two and taking just 30 seconds to install, are yet another of BT's monopolistic cash cows. But pre-requisites for other telcos wanting to "provide access to the Fibre-enabled customer base".

Although promising to safeguard our cherished phone number in that migration, BT promptly 'slammed' the line; seizing the pair from TalkTalk. We were issued a completely new telephone number; the old cherished number now permanently and inexplicably "lost". We were then dumped on ADSL1(!) Where we waited for weeks to be eventually migrated to FTTC; a decidely mediocre service, as it turned out. In the meantime, TalkTalk grizzled about the 'slamming'; and continued to bill us for a service it could no longer provide.

That convoluted and nonsensical migration path allegedly being "easier" than moving us directly from ADSL2+ LLU to BTW VDSL2.

A quite pathetic and painful consumer experience. That was about 2 years ago. Don't suppose anything has improved. While there are no proper rules and regulations for basic migration processes, nothing will improve.

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Edited by deleted (Fri 06-Nov-15 20:38:48)

Do you have any evidence for these cable being trivial, and only taking 30 seconds to install?

The £2000 is per exchange, and the Vat is completely irrelevant for Vat-registered B2B transactions. No big deal.

The rest of your tale I agree is shocking.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Do you have any evidence for these cable being trivial, and only taking 30 seconds to install?

Yup, they're just 1000Base-LX Single Mode Fibre patch cables. (source: Openreach Factsheet: GEA Cablelink; June 2011).

Optical patch cables linking an L2 switch on BT's Main Distribution Frame (MDF) to an L2 switch on the HDF; the Communication Provider's (CP's) Handover Distribution Frame in the co-location/co-mingling zone of the exchange.

Simple fibre optic patch cables costing a couple quid; maximum length a few tens of metres? No splicing or termination necessary. Pre-prepared cables, plugging effortlessly into the fibre transceivers on those L2 switches. Total installation time 30 seconds. Plus the time taken to run an automated script updating the routing tables. £2,000 a pop. Straight into the swelling coffers of BT Group.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

The £2000 is per exchange...No big deal.

Well it's £2000 per cablelink. But each cablelink only has a capacity of 1Gbps; and that's aggregate upstream and downstream combined. Even in the smaller exchanges with moderate take-up of FTTC, the cablelink will soon max out.

And that's what's happening. As take-up of FTTC gains pace, and traffic hammers that solitary cablelink, the CP has to provision another, and then another. With BT creaming off £2000 every time.

But that's only the half of it.

When take-up of FTTC appears low, CPs including TalkTalk are understandably reluctant to "invest". Shying away from expending such huge sums on GEA cablelinks, on the off-chance of attracting enough customers to recoup that expenditure.

Which is why we've witnessed waits of 10 months (in one example) before the CP takes the plunge; before it succumbs and pays BT that £2000 ransom, for that £2 fibre patch cable, just so that it can offer FTTC itself!

But you've been here a while Bob and must know this already?!

Edited by deleted (Sat 07-Nov-15 05:13:58)

I didn't know that amount of detail, (as if I had done I would obviously not have posted as I did - in reply to your snidey and unnecessary closing sentence), so thank you.

In particular the 1Gbps aggregate throughput of the GEA link amazes me.

Surprising then that this inflated cost has never been mentioned amongst the many thousands of works Sky and TalkTalk have expended to complain about Openreach though is it?

Of course the cost has nothing to do with recovery of some the price of the handover hardware, and its free for labour to run the fibre cable across the floor under a rug and break the lock on the LLU cage to drop the connector into the LLU providers.

How much do data centres charge to connect a 15m fibre from one side of a room to another?

They may be 'simple patch cables', but they may well need to run to a panel in a co-location area several floors away, not within a foot. Certainly not a '30 second job'.

Why do you think it's 1Gb aggregate? The peak capacity is in one direction.
GE Single - Mode interfaces are described in SIN 360

The SX and LX type interface is as specified in the Gigabit Ethernet IEEE 802.3z specifications.

A cablelink doesn't only consist of a patch cable, there are also other elements you have ignored.
There are contributions to the costs of the L2 switch (and any supporting licenses, OAM systems etc), rack systems etc.

Openreach spends the capital for much of the infrastructure and only recovers anything when a SP buys a link.

The £2,000 cost of a Cablelink is trivial compared to the investment the SP needs to make with installing their own equipment and backhaul capable of dealing with the higher bandwidths with FTTx.

Edited by deleted (Sat 07-Nov-15 10:31:48)

Sorry Bob, didn't mean to sound snidey. Just surprised this forum is still discussing the GEA Cablelink, and what it actually is, more than four years after FTTC was first rolled-out.

In reply to a post by panda:

They may be 'simple patch cables', but they may well need to run to a panel in a co-location area several floors away, not within a foot. Certainly not a '30 second job'.

Simple fibre optic patch cables, costing a few quid. And, yes, a 30 second job to install! In fact, they're so inexpensive, they were probably installed ready, but left dark, at the time the L2 switches were fitted. For the sake of argument, let's go for a patch cable that's plenty long enough to reach "several floors away" (!)

GEA CableLink:. 50 metres of single-mode simplex fibre, extra-thick jacket, LSZH, LC connectors:

Cost to BT? £4 max (retail price; fibrestore.com)
Cost to CP? £2000 (current BT Openreach pricelist)

In reply to a post by panda:

Why do you think it's 1Gb aggregate? The peak capacity is in one direction.

Nice bluff but no cigar. Of course the Cablelink throughput is 1Gbps aggregate. It's gigabit ethernet. The clue is in the name. Let's remember how ethernet works. It's a time-based protocol with a fixed number of ethernet frames of fixed size per second across the whole network. Hence the 1Gbps total throughput limitation on any segment of the network. Since you're familiar with the ethernet specification, you presumably knew that too, Panda?

In reply to a post by panda:

A cablelink doesn't only consist of a patch cable, there are also other elements you have ignored. There are contributions to the costs of the L2 switch (and any supporting licenses, OAM systems etc), rack systems etc.

That's not exactly true, is it? The CPs have already paid BT handsomely for access to the co-mingling zones. In fact, CPs must buy the (hugely-overpriced) racks from BT themselves, and the cabinets, the power units, and so on.

But BT, being BT, just has to gouge the competition that little bit more! £2000 in fact, for a cable costing just a couple quid. Tsk! Any wonder there's a "once-in-a-decade" (AKA long-overdue) Ofcom inquiry into all of this?

Enough!

The point in highlighting BT's extortionate charge for a GEA Cablelink (AKA 'inexpensive fibre patch cable') is to show how that prohibitive cost of £2000 for a £2 cable has helped wreck the competition. Delaying the roll-out of FTTC services by rival Communications Providers. Stifling consumer choice, and ultimately driving up costs for end-users. Back in 2012(?) when I asked TalkTalk why it wouldn't "for the foreseeable future" be offering FTTC in my district, the reply was: "With limited interest from potential customers, the cost of the GEA Cablelinks cannot be justified." And that's why we reluctantly switched providers from TalkTalk to BT.

Win-win for BT, but another slap in the face for consumers.

Edited by deleted (Sat 07-Nov-15 23:30:48)