Lightning strike

I had a bad lightning strike on 13/11/15. Blew up my socket, the modem in the router and fried the cables at the pole. About ohhh, say 70 people at least were affected in town by the storm. I also lost my washing machine to lightning coming up the copper pipes into the machine from the ground supply.

Phoned Zen on the Saturday 14th. Zen were, as usual, superb.
Sent me out email and text updates to my mobile. BTO were there by Wed. 18th

Engineer was a great guy. Very helpful (Thanks Paul!!). Sorted out the socket, then he was up the pole for about 2 hours. Bit of a mess. My line had fused on to No. 6's pair. There were about 4 BTO vans and 5 engineers working in my street alone. Down manholes, up poles, a veritable sea of hi-viz jackets.

Paul got my phone and broadband working, and also sorted out a problem with noise and crosstalk on the voice line that I had been having since last year.

My modem was however, fried. I phoned up Zen just after the engineer left and
they sent out a new one free of charge, which arrived on Fri. 20th. They even
phoned me up just to check everything was back up and working.

Stressful having no Net for a week, but Zen and BTO couldn't have done a more
excellent job fixing everything. Cheers!

Wish there was a "like" button and everybody would post when they receive good service!

+1

Good to hear of positive experiences where deserved.
In my own saga with BTOR, Zen havent yet been able to escalate the issue but I'm told that they can as of Monday. Fingers crossed Zen live up to their reputation for me too.

I'm guessing I was unlucky, but I recently had a fault on my line (via Zen) and it took 3 BTOR visits to fix so dragged on a bit. I had a call from Zen once it was over and during the conversation they said to ME why did it take so long??!!??

Had a similar experience a few years back when a lightning strike blew the handset of my phone while I was using it! The same strike fried the underground cable for about 400 meters along the road. BT couldn't have been more helpful and laid a new cable in the bottom of the hedge along the road within about 24 hours. It did take several months before they came back and mole ploughed it in but it meant that our service was off for the minimum amount of time.

I had a lightning strike, a very mild one, last week. More of a tweak. I have three DSL lines (IP-bonded by Andrews & Arnold, aka AAISP), and one of the modems was wiped out. Just dead, no lights, PSU was dead too. Don't know why just the one unit out of the three was affected.

The modems are isolated from mains-borne attacks by no less than three levels of mains anti-surge units and a UPS too, but I have no protection against surges from the phone line itself. I have two Belkin top-of-the-range mains anti-surge devices and a Tacima mains filter as well. The UPS that powers the modems, the router and other core networking kit is a fairly chunky APC one.

I ordered a replacement DLink DSL-320B modem from the (Andrews & Arnold shop immediately. That was not such a wise move, as if I had told AA support, they would have rushed one straight out to me to get it into the post that same afternoon, so I would have got it a day earlier, but in any case AA were great as they used Royal Mail First Class which is always the best way of doing anything here in the Hebrides (Skye) or in the Highlands.

In reply to a post by CecilWard:

I had a lightning strike, a very mild one, last week. More of a tweak. I have three DSL lines (IP-bonded by Andrews & Arnold, aka AAISP), and one of the modems was wiped out. Just dead, no lights, PSU was dead too. Don't know why just the one unit out of the three was affected.

I imagine it's just the path of least resistance that the lightning surge takes until it dissipates.

With me, the router would power up and the LAN side of it would still work, but it wouldn't sync with the cabinet, it just kept trying and failing to get a link up. The engineer tested the line with his equipment and the broadband was up and connected on his unit. We tested all different cables, power cycled it etc. The replacement one sent out has been up and running for 3 days.

My DECT phone, which was connected to the phone socket survived, and is working fine. Go figure,eh ? The engineer said he had seen this a lot with routers where the LAN side worked, but the modem was dead. The phone socket made a loud POP-CRACK! when it blew. I suspect it took the brunt of the discharge, with the modem taking a hit too.

I have anti-surge protection for my computers and related equipment, thankfully they all survived. I've seen no problems with any other electrical equipment in the house excepting my washing machine. That was the only other casualty of the storm, and that came up through the ground via the water mains.