Spedious ADSL reactivation

Hi

Some muppet in accounts 6 weeks ago transferred the number from the analogue ADSL line to the ISDN30 system cos he thought there'd be a cost saving. This took effect about a month ago. The first I head of this was last Tuesday when I received an email from CS saying a cease had been placed on my ADSL account to take effect today.

Needless to say, frantic goings on all week resulting in BT giving us a reactivation of the line and number-transfer-back date on the analogue line of this coming Monday. However the cease still happenned today as originally predicted in the email from CS (up until today the ADSL was working OK despite there being no dial tone from a phone physically plugged into it)

So queue a 4 day wait until installation and then another 5 days to get the ADSL re-activated.

Now my first thought is "Why didn't BT point out at the time the transfer order was placed, that the line had ADSL on it and this would effectively be ceased". Are they obliged to point these details out, and if they are is there someone's knackers I can trap in a vice so that I can get my reactivation done within 24 hours of the line being physically reactivated. I've already trapped the beancounters knackers in my desk drawer.

BT do have a team that focus on spotting unintended ceases of ADSL service but I'm sure that they would work on the presumption that a business should know what it was doing

Mostly they pick up things like account name changes triggering ceases and that sort of stuff.

In my experience, although BT do have a team that set out to spot such things there are inevitably things that slip through the net, in addition I suspect that there is a presumtion with business lines that the business itself knows what it wants and is aware of the consequences.

A long time ago I made arrangements with BT so that only myself, or members of my network team, could place orders for new provides/moves/changes etc. to prevent exactly this kind of situation, where an accountant or business "manager" thinks he/she can save a few

BOFH stylee...

Funnily enough this line was nicely hidden away from everything else and under my control, something I did to stop exactly the situation you describe What didn't help was that the beancounter that placed the order was the FD, and as he was a director they happily accepted the order off him.

The line was reinstalled yesterday, I now have to wait for BT to acknowledge that the line is indeed installed on their database before I can reorder my ADSL on it.

ATM I've got 50 machines running off a single T mobile Web N Walk phone plugged into a laptop running Internet Connection Sharing which in turn is linked to an external SMTP server via PPTP so that emails continue to be delivered. Took me 4 hours to set up, and the weekend for the MX records to replicate to point to the external box but all in all I'm pretty much chuffed with what I came up with in a moment of crisis

The WNW is linking at a faster speed than the ADSL was :/

re: the beancounter that placed the order was the FD

Therefore you need the "Directors Cut" series of nutcracker.