BT Engineer visits

[#1]

May I can contribute a rave to this rant?
Yesterday I had a visit from a BT engineer after reporting a line fault to PN and undertaking the usual tests. He had the courtesy to call me ahead of time to state when he would arrive and upon arrival had a notebook with a page of facts and figures of checks he had already performed at various points along the 3.6 kilometer route of my line from the exchange.
Gratifyingly, he discovered a fault on my line within minutes of connecting his laptop to my master socket; the error rates on my line were huge.. My house was built in 1932 and was occupied by a senior manager of the local steelworks; a telephone would have been installed in the very early days. The engineer discovered a vintage junction box, made of bakelite, containing huge brass connectors and copper fuses, weighing at least half a pound. This he replaced with a dinky, modern box. The error rates fell immediately by at least 2 orders of magnitude and a 4 dB decrease in SNR. My line is still in the "recovery" phase, so I don't know for certain if all my ills have vanished.
The engineer was polite and informative and above all else, useful. Congratulations to PN for getting him here in the first place, as after 18 months as a BT Total Broadband customer, I never attained that level of service.

[#2]

You may or may not have noticed that I've been a bit quiet on this forum for a little while. One reason is that I have been spending some time in warmer climes (and I've got the mosquito bites as a souvenir). Another reason is that the connection problem saga that I have been discussing in this thread and others appear to have been resolved. If you're really interested or simply bored the relevant threads are these.
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,64203.msg516403.html#msg516403
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,64586.msg518996.html#msg518996
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,65371.msg523890.html#msg523890
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,67347.msg539947.html#msg539947
http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,68909.msg550131.html#msg550131
Anyway, to summarise, after trying out 5 different filters, 2 filtered faceplates and 3 routers, and 4 visits from Openreach, I was still left with connection problems. The symptoms were frequent dropped connections and difficulty reconnecting, and slow speeds due to my IP profile constantly being bumped down to 135kbps. The underlying problem became apparent as a result of monitoring of my router stats, that the noise margin was fluctuating greatly and also the different routers often reported significant variation in the downstream line attenuation. After the 4th engineer visit failed to even look for REIN as a potential cause of these symptoms, I was prompted to start this thread in the newly created 'Rant' sub-topic. Unexpectedly, Matt Taylor at Plusnet (orbrey) picked up on this and personally intervened and contacted BTw to ask for equipment checks on my line and at my exchange. Problem cured. Please don't ask me for details, I could barely follow the simple explanation from Matt, but hopefully if he has a mind to he can provide details for you techies out there.
So, what I began as a rant I would like to convert to a testimonial to Plusnet staff who never lost patience with me and persevered (as did I) in resolving the problems. I can't imagine that any other ISP would have achieved this, so thanks to Matt, James (Bailey) and Phil (Richardson) in particular, and everyone on the CSC who responded to my fault tickets. Also thanks to the many members of this forum who contributed advice and encouragement.
The outcome of all this effort has been that I now have a stable connection that runs at 2Mbps instead of an intermittent one that ran on average at less than 0.5Mbps. And this is on a 4km line with a 63dB downstream attenuation. I'm so impressed that it's very likely I'll be using the connection more and have to either buy more usage or upgrade my package.
For anyone having similar problems to mine all I can say is keep persevering and stick with Plusnet
Edited on 3/12/08 - Having recently looked at one of my fault tickets, it was in fact Phil (not Matt) who kicked up a storm with BTw to finally get the fault sorted (some piece of hardware needed to be changed in the exchange). Matt was particularly proactive in keeping me informed by phone of the progress being made prior to Phil's involvement, and explaining some of the technical details.