Activation

[#1]

OK, thanks for the replies @Townman and @Gandalf. I understand what you're saying, although if you know that OR play these games then why not verify the fix using your own data before sending out "It's all fixed" emails and "stopping the clock"...

For those following along: this week they have dug a hole, discovered a gas pipe but not the phone line, got a couple of different guys in to stare down the hole, and then filled it back in again.

[#2]

Thanks for your response @ryansuchocki

As I'm sure you'd be able to understand, I won't be drawn into Openreach communications in regards to improving their stats etc, as there's no way that this can be verified.

As my colleague @Gandalf has mentioned through, it's unclear as to why the Clear Notification was sent through by Openreach even though the fault notes make it clear that the issue has been resolved.

What this does is automatically generate an email to be sent to you, advising that the problem has now been resolved, it also places the ticket into "The Customer"'s pool, meaning our Technical Support Team will no longer come across the Ticket. This can of course be interpreted as us getting shot of the issue, even though it has not been resolved, which s incorrect, although I am able to empathise.

The Ticket does state the following though:

If there is anything else that we can help with then please do not hesitate to get back in touch. You can reply to this ticket through the Member Centre Contact us facility or you can call us on 0800 432 0200

Once you respond to this Ticket, even if it were to say that the issue had been resolved, our system would drop this back into our Technical Support team's workflow. So in this instance, even if @Gandalf hadn't been made aware that the issue is unresolved, our Technical Support Team will have picked up the account.

I've had another look into the fault and can see that you've been provided with an update today, our team will review this again on 21/06/2021. Thank you for your continued patience while we work to resolve the matter with our suppliers.

[#3]

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@ryansuchocki wrote:

I understand what you're saying, although if you know that OR play these games then why not verify the fix using your own data before sending out "It's all fixed" emails and "stopping the clock"...

I think there needs to be some clarification here...

1. As per my signature, I am a customer and thus do not have access to data to test anything
2. I never said that I "know" that this is happening but I said that I "suspect" that might be happening
3. The staff member understandably sought to neither confirm nor deny the suspicion

I have spent a few years working service support desks run by managers who do not understand the work going through the support system but seek to manage the stats, rather than managing the problems.  They are not the same thing.  Managers can appear to significantly improve the performance of their team through creative management of the status of cases, whilst not actually solving problems.  In my time I have seen...

1. Big jobs broken down in to little jobs - makes it look like the unit is doing more work with the same heads clearing jobs quicker
2. Move jobs to other teams
3. Close jobs as no fault found / cannot reproduce / resubmit with more evidence
4. Simply close the job as fixed when it is not - this works in management systems where a failed to be fixed job cannot be reopened, but instead needs a new case creating - this defers the issue and increases the number of case processed metric

Based on experience I can see echoes of the above in respect to this closed case from BTOR.  I do not KNOW that is true here, but I can legitimately have suspicions!

Whatever, none of this fixes your issue - I just hope that the next person has a better clue of where to dig the hole.

[#4]

Another month, another update...

OR concluded that the cable fault was directly under a neighbor's pretty mature hedge (which, understandably, they did not want uprooted) so decided to cut their losses on the ancient copper and run in a new conduit from a junction a bit further down the road.

After 3 or 4 false starts (dig team turn up but decide that traffic management is needed, traffic management turn up, get the traffic lights out, cause havoc with the bin lorry and then find out that the dig team aren't coming that day and pack it all away again, that sort of thing...) we've now got a nice shiny new copper pair (at least for the last ~20m or so). The "battery contact" fault is cleared and the OR engineer said that the line passed the "Pair Quality Test" with flying colours.

That's all very exciting. The only down side is that the VDSL sync speed is still stubbornly exactly where it was before (syncing at either ~33 or @28 Mbps).

[#5]

Good news up to a point. Sight of your router status wound be helpful.

I suspect that the line configuration needs to be reset … I’m surprised that BTOR did not do this after rerouting your circuit.

[#6]

Hi @ryansuchocki

Thanks a lot for reaching out again and I'm really sorry to see that the issues on your line are ongoing, though it's refreshing to see that the phone fault has now been resolved. Saying that though, tests on your Broadband service this morning have found identified an impairment in a copper joint, that's most likely affecting your Fibre service.

We'd now need to arrange a fibre engineer appointment to investigate this matter. I'm just about to send you an SMS asking you to respond with some available dates / times for another engineer visit. give me a nudge on here once you've responded  and I'll be happy to get the fault raised as soon as.

KBD

GEA Test Detail
Circuit ID	NA	Service ID

Test Outcome	Fail
Test Outcome Code	GTC_FTTC_SERVICE_1624
Description	Impairment in copper joint detected most likely close to customer premises. Please continue to submit a trouble report.
Main Fault Location	CA
Sync Status	In Sync
Downstream Speed	27.0 Mbps
Upstream Speed	5.5 Mbps
Appointment Required	Y
Fault Report Advised	Y
NTE Power Status	PowerOn
Voice Line Test Result	Pass
Radio Frequency Ingress	Detected
Repetitive Electrical Impulse Noise	Not Detected
Cross Talk	Detected
Estimated Line Length In Metres	539.6
Upstream Rate Assessment	Low
Downstream Rate Assessment	Low
Home Wiring Problem	Not Detected
Downstream Policing Discard Rate	0.0
Customer Traffic Level	Upstream and Downstream traffic detected
Technology	VDSL
Current 15Min Bin Retrains	0
Last 15Min Bin Retrains	0
DP Type	Internal
Profile Name	0.128M-80M Downstream 3dB, Retransmission High - 0.128M-20M Upstream, Retransmission Low
Time Stamp	2021-07-20T01:15:00

Parameters	MIN	MAX	AVG
Down Stream Line Rate	27.9 Mbps	38.5 Mbps	31.1 Mbps
Up Stream Line Rate	5.4 Mbps	7.1 Mbps	6.4 Mbps
Up Time	0.0 Sec	900.0 Sec	894.9 Sec

[#7]

One would have hoped that such a fault would have been detected by the eclipse exit test ... leading one to wonder if the BTOR engineer repairing the cable actually ran one?

Testing from the premises to the exchange is not the same as testing from the exchange to the premises.  An engineer is supposed to do both on a fault close-down.

[#8]

Well, dare I say it, the finish line may now be in sight.

The engineer yesterday said that our pair was passing all the quality tests but he detected "excessive cross-talk", and inferred that some other faulty pair adjacent to ours was causing interference. After spending most of the day trying different spare pairs in the segment between the cabinet and the end of our road, we've now got a sync at 58.8Mbps/20.0Mbps. 😀

The only issue is that the download speed (i.e. measured against speedtest.net or the "BT wholesale speed test", over Ethernet of course) still seems to be capped at 24Mbps. It's as if some element further up the chain hasn't caught up with the faster VDSL yet...

[#9 · Accepted solution]

Hi @ryansuckocki, thanks for getting back in touch and I'm glad to hear the speeds look to have taken a positive turn. I can confirm looking over your account this side it looks like the account is currently being banded to 25Mbps which explains the speeds seen your side when testing. I've now uncapped this for you and if your go ahead and turn the router off and back on you should see the speeds jump back up to normal for you.
Let us know how this goes.

[#10]

😍

Hoorah!

After 74 days I do now have speeds within the original estimate (and am getting something for my £3 more a month for "fibre extra" 😃).

Thanks everyone @ plusnet. Some of your automated processes could be improved but in the end I think you did an OK job of interfacing with BTOR.

TL;DR: BTOR replaced/switched every bit of copper between us and the cabinet, and we now have the expected speed.