BT disconnected my neighbour

My neighbour and I both live about 3.5 miles from the local BT exchange. We have both had ADSL since it became available to us at 512kb/s, he is with BT Broadband. I use Plus Net ; apart from the initial install, which required BT engineers to upgrade the internal house wiring and master sockets to the internal filtered type, we have never had any disconnection issues. Now BT have disconnected him after a few weeks of connection problems because they say they cannot guarantee his connection speed, which they tried to ramp up to 2Mb/s without success. What should he do, and will plus net do the same to me? He has spent hours on the phone, as most of the BT departments have no idea what to do, the engineers said the problem is because more people now use ADSL and their circuits are interfering with his. So they cut him off!!!

is this legal and whats the solution?

many thanks.

Graham Smout

If the 0.5Mbps service was working well then you would expect them to put the person back onto that.

I suspect this was BT Wholesale cutting off on instructions from BT Retail. So unless Plusnet tell BT Wholesale to do the same to you nothing should happen.

Legal - depends on how it was all done, but they are allowed to mark a line as not supporting ADSL. Without any figures or data to go by it is hard to say whether they were doing the right thing or not.

Andrew

In reply to:

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which they tried to ramp up to 2Mb/s without success

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Do you mean that (a) the 512kb service was reliable until your neighbour requested the upgrade to 2Mb which failed, or (b) the 512kb service became unreliable by itself and BT attempted a service change to resolve the problem?

Lines can and do get worse over time, and certainly one major contribution to this is the increase in the number of people using ADSL and/or leaving ADSL running on their line 24/7.

As far as i know he didnt request anything (and neither did I but myaccount details I have say im on 8mb/s whereas in fact i only get 512kb/s )
I know that plus net applied upgrades to all customers but in my case it obvioulsy didnt work so it was cancelled.

Thanks for your reply.

"Lines can and do get worse over time, and certainly one major contribution to this is the increase in the number of people using ADSL and/or leaving ADSL running on their line 24/7."
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Permit me, but have not users been advised to leave routers connected to lines enabled at 'Up to 8Mbs' to avoid BT's software interpreting reguar disconnections by the user as a problem? Do you work for BT or quote me the source of the item regarding 'running' 24/7. I was under te impression that once ADSL was enabled & being paid for it was available. The term 'always on' has often been used to describe an ADSL connection, so could you please clarify.

I dont think the poster was complaining about an ADSL line been left synced all the time, but pointing out what has been known since ADSL was created, that as the density of ADSL lines in a bundle increases you can see increasing cross talk, reflected perhaps as a reduction in noise margin.

Compared to more local sources of interference it would appear to be a minor issue generally.

As for leaving routers on all the time, there is no harm in powering down overnight, the choice is yours.

Pro: Save a bit of electricity, and if your line is unstable at night the BT systems wont see this.
Cons: If line is slow to sync then PC may have booted by the time the router has synced and authenticated.

ADSL2+ has ways of alleiviating the cross talk with various power saving modes.

Andrew

Max should run on a line that manages 0.5Mbps, if it has problems it will sync as low as 160Kbps.

So it is hard to see how Max did not work, or do you mean the number of resyncs was too high to be tolerable?

Andrew

Thank you for your clarification.

As far as I can tell once the line was "upgraded" to 2Mb/s it stopped syncing at acceptable levels; so he (my neighbour) called BT. They tested the line and then condemned it as unsuitable for ADSL so he has been cut off. Its a b********. What can he do?Then the engineers decided it was also due to "interference" because so many new ADSL customers are using circuits which are adjacent on the main cable he uses. has to be said, it was a bit tricky getting BB 512kb/s in our remote location to begin with but its worked perfectly for nigh on 2 years since it became available in this area; its demise has coincided with the upgrades of lines to 8Mb/s and the general expansion of ADSL

This leaves one wondering if more connections will die as a result of expansion of ADSL coverage.

Graham

If it had been working at 0.5Mbps but wouldn't work at 2Mbps then they should have regraded back down to 0.5Mbps again.

Are you sure this was an upgrade to 2Mbps, and not an upgrade to Max, where the estimated speed would be 2Mbps?

I think its more a case of something going wrong on the admin side, than a true failure of ADSL to work. As I say many times, without any attenuation or noise margin data it is hard to do anything, and the time of the year makes it even harder. In the New Year I may be able to chase some people to find out the details of what went and explain it properly.

Andrew