Well it has been a while since I was last here. Some of you probably remember my 75 long days waiting and 11 engineers to get my line set up and working.
I figured that seeing as it is currently 6 days with my new fault I might as well drop this in here also, see if the community has some better answers again.
Around the time of the mass outage Saturday my internet died. In my case I completely lost the light for broadband on the router. No green, no red, no intermittent.
11 hours later I managed to get through to plusnet (I accept a LOT of people were trying to get through to them at this point) and explained the situation. They said wait until the current outage was resolved which I did.
I was greeted by a message on my next call saying the issue was fixed and to reboot the router etc or visit the website to submit a ticket. Clearly not something I was able to do.
I got through to support after an hour and a half and was told there was degradation on my line but because BTO were currently fixing a fault on my exchange it was probably that causing my problems and it was due to be fixed by 5.32 and 29 seconds.
At 10pm I finally got through to them again to tell them my fault still persisted to be told the fault at the exchange had actually been rectified the day before at half 5.. so they ran a more thorough line test and told me I was out of sync and booked an engineer.
As per my previous history with this line, no engineer materialised. Back to plusnet.
Notified engineer did not arrive as BTO never sent one. However they had now identified another fault on at the exchange. An optic card needed replacing and would arrive at 11.15, an engineer had been tasked and all would be well by the end of the day.
That was yesterday. Gavin in support has been as helpful as he can and as days have passed the call waiting times have become a little more bearable (still not what was promised back when they opened the new call centre) but manageable.
However it is still a different story and explanation everytime I call (I also acknowledge a LOT of this is just BTO being their usual selves and if they are sending out any of the engineers (bar one or two) who attempted to fix my last problem then god help me this could be another 75 day issue!). A lot of the suggested issues do not seem to ring correct. After-all no broadband light AT ALL.. no red. no intermittent. nothing. Router reports no adsl on my line. And each 'fix' BTO implement changes the status not a bit.
It is worth noting that when I first came to Plusnet setting up my internet knocked my neighbour's off. Previously when they had theirs first installed the farm house lost theirs. In fact my neighbour's have since had satellite broadband installed as every time one of us got a fix another lost their connection.
Also worth noting that although I lost my internet service around the time of the major outage, BTO were actually out at the exchange working on another job/problem.
I highly suspect its another case of doing work for one person and killing mine in the process. I wouldn't be surprised if they have stolen my wires/connection in the exchange again to use for someone else.. as they have repeatedly done in the past in our area.
This currently puts my broadband connection since original installation date at 81 days offline since Late January and I will probably be waiting for yet another engineer before we get this issue fixed once again. Not a brilliant performance and substantially closer to me killing the service altogether and forking out the cost of satellite broadband installation and removing the home phone line as my neighbour has now done.
On a side note, the entire time the broadband did work it was quite stable with one annoying factor. Once or twice a day my pages refuse to load or I get kicked out of my Destiny online session or my wife gets interrupted halfway through a program on iPlayer.. every day (We can only do one or the other usually - my connection wont stand her on iPlayer and me on my Xbox at the same time as a rule..) . The internet light remains green throughout and the only resolution is to shut down the router, unplug. leave it a while. Turn it back on on. Sometimes this is a rinse and repeat issue.
Now while my router is in the coolest location in the house and our rickety old farm house is not a warm place to live! the router always seems unnecessarily hot (both when functioning correctly and when not doing so). As someone who works with business IT networks on a routine basis I do have occasion to reboot, replace and otherwise handle a fair amount of routers and this is hotter than I would expect. Unfortunately I have rarely come across this basic model working primarily with businesses so it may be quite normal for this router to sit at temperature and the rebooting issue may be unrelated.
Sorry for the long essay but from experience I tend to receive a wealth more information from the community than on telephone support and things seem to get updated more often and with better detail / explanation here.
Thanks if you got through all of that.
