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LOS red light on ONT

geoffday67
Hooked
Posts: 8
Registered: ‎23-07-2025

LOS red light on ONT

Had this tonight and therefore no internet. Texting the bot says there's a fault and I need an engineer visit, but that won't be for 2 days. Anyone got any thoughts how I might get this fixed quicker?

I'm not surprised it's failed tbh, I have zero faith in the installer. He was complaining how difficult it was to strip fibre cable without breaking it - did he not have a proper fibre stripper tool? He drilled my wall from the inside so broke a chunk of brick off as the drill broke through which I now have to repair. He put the screws holding the ONT directly into the wall without wall plugs so they are loose and the box is wobbling. He left the router in "setup" mode, I had to do a lot of googling to learn I had to put my own username/password in.

22 REPLIES 22
bmc
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Re: LOS red light on ONT

@geoffday67 

Can't help with the loss of service but you can file a report with OpenReach about the quality if the install. The form is on their website somewhere.

 

Installers always drill from the inside to out. It sounds as though they may have forgotten to turn off the hammer function on the drill before they got close to the external wall.

 

Brian

outcast
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Re: LOS red light on ONT


@bmc wrote:

 

... you can file a report with OpenReach about the quality if the install. The form is on their website somewhere.


 

Probably this - https://www.openreach.com/help-and-support/damage-health-and-safety 

 

Report damage vandalism or a health & safety issue Openreach.png

MisterW
Superuser
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Re: LOS red light on ONT

@geoffday67 

Other have answered regarding quality of the install but to answer the remaining...

Texting the bot says there's a fault and I need an engineer visit, but that won't be for 2 days. Anyone got any thoughts how I might get this fixed quicker?

It requires an Openreach engineer and so will be subject to their standard SLA for fault investigation

He left the router in "setup" mode, I had to do a lot of googling to learn I had to put my own username/password in.

That's normal, the router should autoconfigure with the correct credentials. Also the installation engineer is an Openreach contractor and has no access to your username details.

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.

bmc
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Registered: ‎28-02-2017

Re: LOS red light on ONT

@geoffday67 

Hope you're not based in Scotland.

 

OR engineers could well be re-assigned to deal with the storm damage.

 

Brian

geoffday67
Hooked
Posts: 8
Registered: ‎23-07-2025

Re: LOS red light on ONT

Thanks for the info, but I had to enter my password as part of my credentials. Does that mean that Plusnet also has access to my password?

When I rang support recently I was asked for letters from my password which suggests again that Plusnet store my password in non-hashed form.
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jab1
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Re: LOS red light on ONT

@geoffday67 Your password is stored by PN , otherwise how would they validate a login by you?

It is stored in hashed form - when support ask for characters from you password, only those being requested are displayed on the agents screen.

John
geoffday67
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Registered: ‎23-07-2025

Re: LOS red light on ONT

Thanks, but if it's hashed then the original password can't be extracted in order to see certain letters, or to send remotely to my router.
When I enter my password on the website, the web site hashes it and sends the hashed version to PN which compares it to the hashed password in their database. So the plain version is never stored. That's my understanding of normal practice. So if there is a hack then only the hashed passwords can be stolen in the worst case.
jab1
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Re: LOS red light on ONT

You will never know, because for obvious reasons, PN will never  reveal their security protocols.

John
geoffday67
Hooked
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Registered: ‎23-07-2025

Re: LOS red light on ONT

I know what you mean, but the fact that they can see letters from my password and supply my password to my router shows that they are storing my password un-hashed iiuc.
jab1
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Re: LOS red light on ONT

If they are, do you not think that there wouldn't be countless PN accounts hacked?

John
geoffday67
Hooked
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Registered: ‎23-07-2025

Re: LOS red light on ONT

I'm definitely not a security expert and I'm sure that a big company like PN would have robust security as you say. Still, there's a question to be answered, how they are able to access my password.
jab1
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Re: LOS red light on ONT

Which you won't get an answer to, as that could compromise their security protocols.

John
Ian06
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Re: LOS red light on ONT


@geoffday67 wrote:
I'm sure that a big company like PN would have robust security as you say. Still, there's a question to be answered, how they are able to access my password.

I am not a security expert either, but they must store the pw encrypted so that they can be programmatically decrypted to check and distribute to the router. 

You would assume a user interface for CS will prompt for some of the letters from your password and validate them against the pw that is stored encrypted...  they must use 2-way encryption to be able to do this and not a 1-way hash that could only be used to check the whole password...  it would obviously be much less secure if you needed to given your whole password over the phone to someone.

I doubt anyone will give a proper explanation of how it works and how they store password - for security reasons.

geoffday67
Hooked
Posts: 8
Registered: ‎23-07-2025

Re: LOS red light on ONT

That's my point, passwords are stored in a decryptable format. Is that allowed? How secure is the decryption process? Sure I wouldn't expect PN to give me any details, and I don't lose sleep over it. But if there's a data breach like the co-op etc then someone will get a decryptable password list at best, maybe the decryption key too or whatever they use at worst.