Please would someone in Support take pity on me and take charge of an intermittent phone fault that has been plaguing me for the last year, and which so far four Openreach engineering visits have failed to fix. During the first three visits (while my phone was still with BT) the fault stubbornly refused to show up. Finally, this time the fault stayed on long enough for the engineer to hear it when he arrived, but it then went away for just long enough for him to make his escape. Since then the fault has stayed on almost permanently for the last four days.
It's the same routine every time. First I wait until the fault is serious enough to report. Then, with a wired phone plugged into the master test socket, customer support can hear the crackles, but when they run a line test no fault shows up, leading to the conclusion that the fault is likely to be within my property and an engineering visit is needed. Each time it's a different engineer who starts again from scratch with the assumption that the fault is within or close to my property. On three occasions now they have called out a cherry picker to check the overhead junction boxes in the lane, but they never find anything.
It could just be coincidence but the problem started during the time when fibre broadband was being brought to the village. This involved diverting all our lines through a new local combined PCP/DSLAM cabinet and bypassing our previous PCP cabinet in the next village.
The symptoms are consistent with a high resistance joint rather than insulation breakdown, in that the noise is only there while line current is being drawn. There is also an associated increase in hum level as the line becomes unbalanced. There is no obvious correlation between the fault and factors like wind, rain, temperature or time of day, it just seems to come and go at random. The only obvious pattern is that by the time the engineer shows up, the fault is very likely to be back in its dormant phase.
It is noticeable that incoming ringing can often either bring on or temporarily suspend the fault, so delicate handling is needed to prevent the fault from going away during investigation.
An obvious suspect would be a faulty joint where the old cables were intercepted during the installation of the new cabinet, however if there is such a fault it has somehow managed to evade all detection.
Since switching to fibre broadband (FTTC), the broadband connection has been rock solid. Admittedly the noise margin is very healthy at around 20dB, but if the fault were between here and the cabinet I would at least expect to see some fluctuation when the fault is on, but it never wavers.
During one Openreach visit, the engineer swapped out the entire section of line from the cabinet to the exchange. At first this appeared to fix the fault but after a few weeks it reappeared, implying that the fault is not between the cabinet and the exchange.
All of which leads me to wonder if this might not be a line fault at all but an exchange fault. I suggested this to the last engineer but he said he would need clear evidence for this before going down that route.
And so we're right back at square one again, except that the fault is steadily getting worse. It would be easy enough to fix if only Openreach were prepared to be a little more flexible, and they'd save themselves a lot of wasted time, but going repeatedly through the usual channels there seems little prospect of this ever happening. Ticket number 146929754 is off hold and awaiting your response, so the ball is back in your court.
