The Wrong Type of BT Engineer!

For about 2 months I had been complaining to Orange about my reduction of Sync Speed since they moved me from LLU to BT WBC and had been suggesting that my training period needed to be restarted and/or my Noise Margin lowered as they were holding me at a unnecessarily high NM of 12 dB.

Well, this week Orange phoned me to say they were sending round a BT Engineer, which rather surprised me as surely any work needed to be done at the exchange or remotely by software. Then it occurred to me that maybe something had gone wrong when they moved my line from Orange's LLU kit to BT's WBC and any engineer could check that.

Well. 2 Openreach engs. arrived. They had not been briefed on my problem and even asked me what WBC meant . They then proceeded to test my line, fitted master socket with a filtered faceplate, replaced white box at top outside of house where overhead cable reaches house with a different brown box as being OK but obsolete and declared my line OK and not noisy. They measured Sync Speed similar to my readings.

When I suggested they should look at the exchange end and check the tie-pair (I think it's called) they said Openreach only deal with the wiring between house and exchange and their responsibility ends at the DSLAM. They agreed that my problem must be either in the exchange or in the remote settings, which are handled by some other type of engineer. They are, however, sending in a report on those lines.

What type of engineer is needed for that? It beats me why Orange didn't order the right type of engineer in the 1st place, knowing of what I was complaining. What a waste of Orange's money!

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Well. 2 Openreach engs. arrived. They had not been briefed on my problem and even asked me what WBC meant .

When I had my "new" line checked last week by an Openreach engineer, I made him a cup of tea and chatted about fibre with him. It quickly became obvious he knew absolutely sweet fa about it. No disrespect to any engineers who may read this, but I think that most of them are trained to do just one simple task over and over again.

I don't pretend to understand how BT works, but isn't this a consequence of the (usual) meddling of Ofcom (in the interests of the competition god, of course). Openreach are a (ring-fenced by law, Ofcom dicktat) "sub-contractor" for the line from exchange to premises, of presumably in our case BT Wholesale who now "run" Orange broadband, which is just the marketing "badge". EDIT: I can easily see how this means an Openreach engineer isn't "allowed" to know about WBC, even less meddle with the exchange DSLAM/backhaul that connects you to the ISP servers!! So presumably BT Wholesale decided on a line check either because of or before a check on their exchange equipment. As to who does what, in what order, and how the costs fall, who knows! Apart from taking the customer payment, I doubt if Orange now have anything to do with it. EDIT: Could BTw even decide to limit speeds at an individual exchange e.g if they think there might be a congestion issue on the backhaul?

I had this sort of problem, in reverse: Orange LLU despite their pre-BT engineers doing both a lift and shift and line rebuild could only manage a synch of between 2-3.5Mbps on my line, WBC manages 4.5-6Mbps, same router and set up at my end, and neither the attenuation nor error rates have changed. To confuse things even more: Orange LLU reported 9-12db NM, and WBC has wandered around between 6 & 14db with faster speeds throughout the range! Both have been ADSL2 or 2+, with no material difference on download between the two variants

Edited by deleted (Thu 07-Jul-11 18:58:46)

Not only was it a waste of time sending engs here, while they were here they fitted a faulty Openreach filtered faceplate to my master socket, which was OK in the first place, just because it was more up-to-date and more cosmetic.

Since then my corded phone makes a shushing noise during a call. The same phone on my other line is completely silent. By placing a dangly filter between the master socket and the phone the shushing noise disappears completely, which proves that the filter inside the filtered faceplate is defective. They obviously did not test it.

I don't see Orange wasting more money sending engs. around again to fix it, so I guess I'm stuck with a much bulkier socket with a dangly filter hanging off it, which rather defeats its purpose .

I�ve always said, if you want the job done right do it yourself. Fit a new ADSLNation XTE-2005 Filtered Master Faceplate.

http://www.adslnation.com/products/xte2005.php

Or did you ask the engineer to leave your old one.

I have been using two ADSLNation XF-1e dangly filters since 2005 with no problems whatsoever.

http://www.adslnation.com/products/xf-1e.php

No, I never thought of it. I bought the hype that it would just look better.

I've been using router supplied dangly filters for years and have been perfectly happy with them

Are using the ADSLNation XF-1e dangly filters with the ADSLNation XTE-2005 Filtered Master Faceplate? Doesn't that defeat the purpose?