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Banded profile / DLM issue - inflexibility and threats of charges

ccarmock
Rising Star
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Registered: ‎04-11-2013

Banded profile / DLM issue - inflexibility and threats of charges

I have a problem with my PlusNet Fibre broadband - faults have run a test which says there is no fault at my premises and that there is a 30 Mb/s band applied to my line.  The Openreach report states that the next action is to have special faults remove the band.

 

PlusNet faults tell me there HAS to be an engineer visit to my property, yet then go on to tell me if no fault is found there I will get a charge.  Yet the report clearly states that there is no fault at my property.

 

 

This is a crazy situation to be in.  I want the banding removed.  This is remote work it would not be done from my property. 

 

This property is not occupied all of the time so to meet an engineer who will do nothing at the property I will need to take a day off work travel 170 miles to wait in for an engineer that will do nothing there.  PlusNet say I will then get a charge for no fault found.

 

Please can one of the forum team step in and end this madness and help me get this band removed from my line.

 

 

 

 

6 REPLIES 6
Anoush
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Re: Banded profile / DLM issue - inflexibility and threats of charges

Hello there,

Sorry to hear of the issues you are experiencing. If your fibre is banded, the line can only be reset by an engineer calling DCoE (diagnostics centre of excellence). And the only way to progress this would be to arrange an engineer appointment I'm afraid.

If this is arranged and done, then there would be nothing to worry about as for a no fault found call out charge, because the engineer would have fixed a fault by arranging for the line to be reset.

I hope this helps

This is my personal Community Forum account to help out around these parts while I'm at home. If I'm posting from the 1st March 2020, this means I'm off-duty with no access to internal systems.
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ccarmock
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Registered: ‎04-11-2013

Re: Banded profile / DLM issue - inflexibility and threats of charges

Thanks - the issue is that this property is not occupied all the time so this will mean a special visit purely to let an engineer turn up, and do nothing other than make a phone call.   Hopefully you can see why this is not a sensible situation to be in?

Chris
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Registered: ‎05-04-2007

Re: Banded profile / DLM issue - inflexibility and threats of charges

I understand the situation, unfortunately there isn't a way around this. We've pushed and pushed previously for lines to be reset but this simply will not happen without an engineer visit.

Former Plusnet Staff member. Posts after 31st Jan 2020 are not on behalf of Plusnet.
ccarmock
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Registered: ‎04-11-2013

Re: Banded profile / DLM issue - inflexibility and threats of charges

Thanks Chris it's a crazy situation, as the report states no fault at my property.    I have had reassurance from PlusNet that there will be no charge as this is a DLM issue, despite the warning of a charge at first.     However I assume Openreach will accept my charge if I have to make a special trip for this and they actually do no work at my property just reset DLM via a phone call, which actually could have been done without me being present.

 

I think PlusNet & other ISPs should complain loudly to Openreach here, as this is not a satisfactory situation.  They only get away with this because they still have too much of the market share here. 

Since you have remote DLM reset capability on standard ADSL2+ lines I am sure you would find it a lot more customer orientated if you could do the same for fibre broadband lines.

 

 

 

Andrue
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Re: Banded profile / DLM issue - inflexibility and threats of charges


Since you have remote DLM reset capability on standard ADSL2+ lines I am sure you would find it a lot more customer orientated if you could do the same for fibre broadband lines.

Unfortunately the two systems are completely different and even operated by different BT divisions. BT's ADSL services are designed and operated by BT Wholesale whereas BT's FTTC services are designed and operated by openreach and BT Wholesale then built their own product on top which is what PN actually purchase. Although they both use something called 'DLM' it's a different implementation and operates in different ways.

There may be technical reasons why openreach does not allow CPs to reset DLM or they may just have felt that getting PN to talk to BTw who would then have to talk to openreach was just too complicated. There may even be regulatory issues that make it impractical to give CPs control over DLM.

Sadly that's just the way it is. PN cannot ask for anything that their suppliers don't offer. The UK telecoms market is highly regulated and especially when it comes to interactions with BT. The idea is that it ensures a level playing field for all companies but sometimes as you are discovering it can cause annoyance to customers by stifling creativity.

ejs
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Re: Banded profile / DLM issue - inflexibility and threats of charges

It can't be due to the difficulty of getting the information from the ISP through BTWholesale to Openreach, because they can already order one of the three DLM profiles, which Openreach call Speed, Standard and Stable (BTWholesale call them Standard, Stable and Super Stable).

The technical reasons why Openreach don't allow it are possibly because the DLM applies banding as part of its normal operation, and so everyone promptly resetting the banding would make that pointless. And then some people will just demand their line gets reset whenever their speed goes down, even though just trying to fix that by resetting it may be completely inappropriate. It's not the same as ADSL2+ where banding is only used in severe cases. On FTTC, the DLM does not change the target SNRM, instead it caps the speed, and by reducing the speed it increases the SNRM.

In this particular case, we have no idea why the line is banded, so we have no way of knowing if the DLM will put the banding back after a week or two, and then the reset will have been a complete waste of time.