Advice needed re. resistance fault

[#1]

Hello people of the Plusnet,
I've just switched over from Be, following the Be/o2 sell-off to Sky and am looking to get a long-standing line fault resolved. Over the past couple of years my line has been deteriorating and has reached the point where is it barely useable in freezing weather. Last winter I finally decided to request a visit from Openreach, knowing that the line would very likely be noisy as hell when they arrived. The notorious OR rigmarole ensued; after 6 home visits, nothing was resolved, although OR management repeatedly claimed the fault had been dealt with. On the last visit, I got lucky and was visited by an engineer who was up for doing some more careful diagnostics. He found an HR fault 30m back from the pole, on the cabinet side. All free spaces on the same pole were affected by the same fault, so he told me they'd have someone come up and repair the offending joint, and assuming it wasn't masking another discontinuity closer to the cabinet, all would be resolved the next day. The end of the next day came, OR reported the fault fixed and the line was still noisy as hell - no surprises there. I know for a fact the joint had not been worked on because my router had not been disconnected between the last home visit and closure of the case by OR management. Sure enough, as soon as I reconnected a phone and did a quiet line test, the router disconnected, followed by sudden cracking and and an audible DSL handshake attempt.
I let the matter slide due to being so p*****-off with OR demanding so much of my time for unnecessary home visits, and the line did get better again as the weather warmed up. The fault has gotten worse again during this hot weather, whilst I've been waiting to switch to Plusnet. Unfortunately the HR fault appears to be even more problematic now the line is serving VDSL. I'm guessing that I cannnot call this in as a 'voice fault' until my phone line is being managed by Plusnet, but can you guys confirm that you're willing to pursue the matter for me? I'm hoping here that you agree that DSL disconnection during telephone calls is not considered acceptible. The HG612 has been disconnecting frequently regardless of whether the handset is lifted, anyway.
Cheers

[#2]

Hi there,
It's definitely not acceptable, no, and given that it is a noisy line issue would probably be faster if progressed as a voice fault. Given that you know where the fault lies this should at least help with the reporting and escalation of the fault, though I'm afraid once it's with our suppliers we can't make any guarantees except that we'll ensure all the information you've given us is passed on.
I can see you've started running through the faults wizard, I'd recommend completing that but making sure to note that the drops are being caused by a noisy line - if you let us know when that's done we can get a line test done and get it raised for you.
Hope that helps, and thanks for such useful notes

[#3]

Hi Matt,
Yeah, I stopped the fault wizard thinking you would't be able to progress the fault until Plusnet are also managing PTSN on my line. The HG612 has now almost sustained 24 hours of 104500/33725 at 16dB, and even survived an incoming call. I'm guessing this is about what it should be for a 120m-ish run from the cabinet - gotta love intermittent faults, eh OR I'm on the 53Mb/s profile atm, as the first few days of training has seen wildly swinging downstream SNR margin and frequent disconnects.
Will complete the wizard this morning, then. Fingers cross that I get an engineer who is not going to umm-and-arr about calling a hoist out and getting up the pole. Last time, they renewed the NTE5 to the first junction box outside and then renewed the line from that junction box to the pole, all before actually doing diagnostics from the pole. Apparently, this was because it saves calling a hoist out. Nevermind wasting 5 mornings of my life. Their fault diagnosis seems almost as chaotic as their scattered appointment schedules. There is also still 2 junction boxes between NTE5 and pole, which a later engineer was tutting at ;D.

[#4]

Ah, apologies - didn't notice that the phone order was still going through. I reckon we could report it as a broadband fault though and get things moving, if need be we could cancel that and raise a voice fault once the line with us if the broadband fault doesn't fix it.
Also, eep - that wiring doesn't sound great at all 😕 we'll bear that in mind once we get the fault raised and make sure it's in the notes.

[#5]

Thanks, but I think I'll leave it until my phone order is complete. The line is bonkers. It's now still synced at 100Mbit on a 16db SNR profile (!) and there is no audible pink noise on the line. It has not been this reliable or clear sounding in years! Whatever is going on at the MSAN in BTs little black green box, I dunno, but it seems to be working so for. Latency is pretty high, though. Hopefully whatever interleaving etc that is being performed as part of DLM will be reduced in time. It'd be nice to on higher IP profile, too.

[#6]

Quote

Thanks, but I think I'll leave it until my phone order is complete

That will be for the best, I can see that the order issue should be resolved by 6/8/13
Adam

[#7]

Thanks for the help, chaps.
If the line stays like this, I'll not bother. I'm guessing that only a narrow range of tones are affected by the HR fault and that the hardware is working around them. Wish I 'd switched to VDSL and Plusnet a whole lot sooner than I did!
If the line remains reliable and my IP profile doesn't change in a couple of weeks, would it be possible for you to request that it be reset?

[#8]

Quote

If the line remains reliable and my IP profile doesn't change in a couple of weeks, would it be possible for you to request that it be reset?

It's not something we can request for an FTTP connection, but in the same token neither should we need too as the IP profile should just change. Obviously do let us know if it doesn't but I'd doubt it to be honest.
Adam

[#9]

I've just called this in as a voice fault; I am having trouble hearing the telesales b@57a#d5! when they interrupt my broadband service
The line is particular bad at the minute, so OR shouldn't have any trouble relocating the HR fault... He said rather optimistically...

[#10]

Wow, I think OR have actually fixed the fault! After previously replacing everything between my phone and the pole over 5 visits, it turns out that the jointing beneath the pole was knackered. The casing had perished and there was a short length of degraded aluminium in there. All it took was one diligent engineer to open the manhole right beside my house... OR management definitely lied last time when they closed the fault, claiming it had been fixed. The bad joint was 30m back from the pole - exactly where the last engineer to visit had found a fault. British Telecom have no qualms about willfully wasting my time, but would slam me with punitive charges for wasting theirs. But at least not all arms of the BT monopoly are so shocking unprofessional; thank you for the help guys, 'tis appreciated!

xdslcmd: ADSL driver and PHY status
Status: Showtime
Retrain Reason:	2
Max:	Upstream rate = 32642 Kbps, Downstream rate = 123404 Kbps
Path:	0, Upstream rate = 19999 Kbps, Downstream rate = 77567 Kbps
Discovery Phase (Initial) Band Plan
US: (0,95) (880,1195) (1984,2771) 
DS: (32,859) (1216,1959) (2792,4083) 
Medley Phase (Final) Band Plan
US: (0,95) (880,1195) (1984,2771) 
DS: (32,859) (1216,1959) (2792,4083) 
       VDSL Port Details       Upstream        Downstream
Attainable Net Data Rate:      32642 kbps        123404 kbps
Actual Aggregate Tx Power:        1.7 dBm          12.9 dBm
============================================================================
  VDSL Band Status        U0      U1      U2      U3      D1      D2      D3
  Line Attenuation(dB):	 0.1	 12.5	 18.7	  N/A	 7.8	 17.1	 26.6	
Signal Attenuation(dB):	 0.1	 12.4	 18.7	  N/A	 7.8	 17.1	 26.6	
        SNR Margin(dB):	 12.4	 13.1	 12.0	  N/A	 13.5	 13.6	 13.7	
         TX Power(dBm):	-4.4	-52.5	 0.5	  N/A	 9.3	 7.2	 7.4

Nice!

[#11]

Fantastic news I've upped your profile on our side to 75000 so it matches the improved one on the BT side, but hope things stay working for you from now on

[#12]

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but it turns out the fault is still not resolved, so I thought it better to continue this one, where all the previous info is available.
The line was OK for a couple of weeks after my last post and then I began to see disconnects when my landlord came to holiday for a couple of weeks in the house next door. Since then my line has continued to deteriorate as winter begins to draw in. Plusnet arranged for an OR engineer to come out this morning. He dazzled me with Openreach acronyms and showed me the flow charts for the two fault testing processes. He followed the CDTA as requested by Plusnet and everything passed, however he could see that there is clearly something seriously awry - the downstream is at 10Mbit/s and there are big holes in the bit allocation table. The max attainable was 150 Mbit/s (which is interestingly about 30 Mbit/s higher than I see with the HG612).
I occasionally do quiet line tests after the sync has dropped and more often than not, there is crackling and incoming calls still cause loss of sync. I included details of the fault's history in my support request to plusnet, but a CDTA was requested regardless, when a CIDT would clearly have been the best course of action. So, that's another morning of my life lost to a pointless OR visit and also the potential for being charged for the fault on my line! The engineer was clearly frustrated at being hamstrung too, but at least he gets paid for it. I've had 8 visits from OR now and this really does need to get sorted. I put off raising it again whilst the line is bearable - I can really do without the stress.
The engineer who did the jointing work last time said the next step would be to replace the entire length of cable from the UG to the drop line. I relayed this information to the engineer this morning, but he could do nothing because a) a CDTA was requested and b) he wasn't a jointer. Please request a CIDT (or whatever is required) and pass full fault information to OR, as was done when I last raised the issue on the forums.

[#13]

Sorry to hear this issue isn't sorted yet, we're waiting for the engineer notes to come back.
I've added these notes to your fault and we'll be in-touch regarding this.

[#14]

An engineer did an impromptu home visit this morning. It was a good job I was in because the notes he'd been given were simply "HR shunt". I filled him in and could see he and his apprentice weren't keen on the idea of renewing from the UG to the distribution point. He did a few tests both  with and without a radio filter in place and subsequently decided to fit the filter in-line. He couldn't tell me what frequency range it filtered, but that it did block Radio 5 Live. Doesn't the vDSL plate include a low-pass filter that should cover this? He saw a significant improvement, anyway.. Like he said, time to let 'DLM' do its thing and then keep my fingers crossed that things remain stable at 80/20 in a few days time...

[#15]

This line fault is still not resolved. I've lost count of the number of OR visits, but I think I've had 10 call outs so far, despite knowing roughly where the fault is. It is beyond ridiculous.
I've been putting off broaching the problem again, as it is such a pain in the arse dealing with OR, but the line is still disconnecting every time I receive an incoming call. I use my mobile for outgoing and don't receive many solicited incoming calls, but as you guys have said, this is still not an acceptable state of affairs. I have my gear running off a UPS and was planning on running web and mail servers in the coming weeks, but I can't do this until the fault is resolved.
I've had enough, to be frank. We know where the fault is, but OR have just danced around fixing it. Copious fault details are posted above, please ensure these are passed to OR. An engineer wasn't even supposed to come to my home on the last call out, but he did so because he was not given enough information (see post above). He then just wasted my time by fitting a REIN filter and leaving again. They'll likely need to bring a hoist again, but they won't if they don't know what the crack is.
Sorry to be Mr Angry, but I hope my impatience is understandable.