Line quality vs Zen quality

Howdy, I migrated to Zen back in April (BTMax from May) and was initially unimpressed with the connection stability. It was better than Plus who had my custom previously, but it wasn't really good. I raised a fault with Zen and they raised it with BT, which resulted in a slow-down and, thankfully, increased stability of my line. Since then I was sync-ing about 2.5MB/s with line speeds of about 2.0. Good enough for me provided that stability is good as I need reliability more than speed.

The other week my phone broke down and I got a BT engineer to call. He found a broken wire in the cable from pole to house, replaced it, and moved the master socket to my router. Guess what: line quality jumped, I am syncing now 5.5MB/s now, line speed >4.0MB/s and all is very stable. The engineer was impressed and said that given my >1m distance from the exchange, this was now pretty good compared to other houses he had seen in comparable locations.

The lesson, I suppose, is to suspect the line first and be very clear about this when you raise faults. Speaking to this BT guy (who was extremely helpful btw), the worst that can happen is a 100 quid charge for a line shift (to move your master socket to the router, if the other way round is not possible). I would have thought a 100 quid charge is worth it to avoid the hassle of migrating and stuff. Especially when, ultimately, the line quality is so incredibly important. Use Zen to diagnose the issue and raise a fault, better yet, have a fault with your landline and get the engineer to call. This leads to a total change in BT behaviour - hostile, unhelpful and barely understandable over the phone; professional, knowledgable and really helpful on location. I have learned my lesson now I guess.

Fred

B.T. are much more likely to put in an effort when a fault affects voice than broadband.

My line used to be great considering the distance I am from the exchange from February-August this year (I joined Zen in February), but, post-August 1st all hell broke loose (noise) meaning I now have to have interleaving and sync rate capped by Zen in order to keep things stable (than actually fix the problem). Though B.T. apparently did look at the line it's apparent to me they wasn't really interested in resolving the situation because the voice side of things worked fine. So, in my case, though Zen provide a very good service it's ultimately less-than-brilliant now given the condition of B.T's equipment and is unlikely to be resolved short of things progressing to the point a voice fault occurs.

So, I agree with you that the line can easily be the cause of problems folks experience, than to blame the ISP, though getting a resolution to problems is not always an easy thing to do. In this case I think you were lucky.

In reply to:

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The lesson, I suppose, is to suspect the line first and be very clear about this when you raise faults. Speaking to this BT guy (who was extremely helpful btw), the worst that can happen is a 100 quid charge for a line shift (to move your master socket to the router, if the other way round is not possible).

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A much cheaper way is to move the router next to the master socket (via a filtered faceplate) and then run Cat5 ethernet back to the computer(s). This is usually possible.