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[tuftedduck]

I wonder if some kind soul can advise.

A near neighbour and friend of TD has been complaining recently about his "very slow broadband"......citing as an example
the occasion last week when he attempted to downlload a Flash plug-in for his browser.......a file of 2.4Mbs approx which
took 46 minutes to download.........

Yesterday, he asked if I would go along and have a look as his set up..........the poor fool thinks that TD can help with a
technical problem.....
Anyway, I wandered along and had a look at his router stats.........his ISP is BT and he connects via a BT HomeHub 2.0

His stats are......................
                                              downstream             upstream

connection speed                                                          444kbps
attenuation                                  7.0 db                        2.5 db
noise margin                                9.9 db                      24.0 db  

No downstream connection speed recorded.

Would I be correct in assuming that there is a fault in the exchange, and that his ISP rather than Openreach are the ones to

sort this out ?

Thank you in advance for any advices.

[roseway]

Your neighbour's attenuation is so low that he must almost live next to the exchange, so he should get close to the maximum speed for the service he's subscribed to. There's clearly something badly wrong. I suggest that you reboot the router if this hasn't already been done, just to eliminate a router glitch as a possible cause.

If you're game for a little diagnosis, you should really make sure that he doesn't have an internal wiring problem, so remove the master socket faceplate and connect the router to the test socket inside. If the stats are still much the same, then the only other thing you could try is to use a different router if that's possible. But presumably the HomeHub was supplied by BT, so it's probably best just to make a complaint to the ISP.

[tuftedduck]

Thank you for the kindness of your response.

My apologies, I missed out from my original query that we did take these figures from the router when it was plugged into the test socket, and the router was rebooted during the tests.
There is no other router available to use as a test, unfortunately.

His stats. are remarkably similar to my own, we are about equidistant from the exchange.....in opposite directions from it.  An Openreach engineer resident in the village advises that my line is about 190 metres long.

Will put the problem to the ISP and see what happens.

Thank you again.

[waltergmw]

Hi TD,

You could also do the 17070 option 2 quiet line test and see if it sounds like Niagara Falls or Concorde etc. etc.

Kind regards,
Walter

[tuftedduck]

Thank you for the imput, waltergmw...........will try that, but.......
neighbour has had a long discussion with his ISP who now think that there is a problem in the exchange.........apparently other customers of BT Broadband in the village are suddenly experiencing similar problems........and an engineer is going to the exchange tomorrow afternoon to have a look.

Will let you know what happens thereafter.   

[burakkucat]

there is a problem in the exchange.........apparently other customers of BT Broadband in the village are suddenly experiencing similar problems........and an engineer is going to the exchange tomorrow afternoon to have a look.

Someone can remember when at least one engineer "lived" in the exchange during normal business hours every day and there was a rota for who was to be called for out-of-hours faults.

". . . going to the exchange tomorrow afternoon . . ." -- phooey is the only polite word I can think up, to type here.   

[tuftedduck]

Quick update.

The ISP agreed that there is a fault in the exchange and promised an engineers visit to the exchange to happen Friday 22nd April.

The engineer failed to appear on the due day, so much acrimonious phoning to India call centre, resulting in promise of engineer visiting on 28th. April.

Engineer again failed to appear.... ...........so more phoning and a promise for engineer today.

Will believe it when I see it. 

[roseway]

Dear me, it's startlingly incompetent, isn't it?

[burakkucat]

Quick update.

The ISP agreed that there is a fault in the exchange and promised an engineers visit to the exchange to happen Friday 22nd April.

The engineer failed to appear on the due day, so much acrimonious phoning to India call centre, resulting in promise of engineer visiting on 28th. April.

Engineer again failed to appear.... ...........so more phoning and a promise for engineer today.

Will believe it when I see it. 

Normal working hours are now over, so any progress? 

[razpag]

TD .... my opinion (and it really IS only MY opinion), is that, "There's an engineer working in the exchange", or, "There's a fault in the exchange" is a bog-standard line that is trotted out by the overseas call-centres. I hear it myself most days from the EU's !!! Funnily enough, the same situation where an engineer is promised but never arrives, is also an extremely common occurence.
I'm going to play 'Devils advocate' here, but if there is a genuine fault raised by the SP's for Openreach to action, there will always be an audit-trail. Whether the job has been 'Comped' (signed off) by mistake, or an engineer has fixed a fault elsewhere without visiting the EU's, or even if the engineer decides to just 'Comp' it without doing anything (Not gonna happen with the way we are monitored) ...................................... there will ALWAYS be an audit trail.

Point I'm labouring to make is, ask the SP exactly what the engineer did on the 2 jobs the SP apparently raised. Ask them for the 'Clear code' he used, and the engineers worded report reading out to you. I'm not saying they are lying to you (as engineering staff logistics around Bank Holidays are pretty difficult to maintain), just wondering if they did indeed build the jobs for Openreach to attend site.

[tuftedduck]

Thank you burakkucat and razpag for your contributions to the thread.

I have taken on board all your points, razpag, and will act accordingly.

In response to burakkucat's question...........all I can say is that the plot thickens........
Friday 29th. April..........still no broadband connection available to the EU.
About 1830 hours, EU had a phone call from a young lady with an Asian accent who cheerily and chirpily advised that an engineer had visited the exchange, had resolved the problem and that their broadband connection was now running at 100% efficiency..
This rather baffled the EU who continued to stare gloomily at a non-existant connection going nowhere.
Somewhat robust conversation then follows, during which the Call Centre person went through her normal script routine........and which ended with EU demanding his MAC.

However, shortly after this, our local friendly Openreach engineer turned up (unofficially) at EU's home, demanding tea and buns. Now, I know that the Openreach engineer cannot do much to help, nor can I cite his comments in any complaint to BT Broadband ( must not get him into bother).........however........yesterday local Openreach guy spotted a "broadband" engineer at the exchange and just "happened" to turn up in time to have a chat about the weather and things in general and learned during this chat that " there is a circuit board in there that needs replacing"

Would the comment about a defunct circuit board make sense ? If so, what might the expected time lag be for replacing same ?

The interesting other factor that I learned yesterday is that in the village there are eight (and only eight) EUs with BT Broadband as their ISP.......and all eight of them have exactly the same problem. All other EUs on different ISPs have no problem.

So, ......broken circuit board ? could such a thing affect only one ISP ?

[razpag]

Think you've got your answer there TD !!!

It would appear that a Transmission Engineer has attended site at your local exchange and found a faulty card. Sometimes these faults can be cleared by 're-seating' the card, but if that fails then a new card will indeed be required. I'd be very surprised if he didn't have a spare one on his van, therefore be able to do a like-for-like swap there and then

The 'cards' generally carry 32 or 64 EU's circuits, depending on make and version. You ask if a broken card can only affect one SP ?? Yes, as it will only be a faulty card in BT's Broadband Equipment Rack. The other SP's BER's have their own cards installed.

[tuftedduck]

Thanks again for the advices, razpag.

So, 

Transmission Engineer visits exchange, identifies problem as being with a faulty card.
Those in the know would expect engineer to have suitable replacement cards about his person....and would reseat or replace as appropriate.
BT Call Centre advices EU that problem resolved.

BT Call Centre can only have had that info. from Transmission Engineer..........who has presumably done something, or why else report the fault repaired.
However, EU still has no connection..........so has TransEngineer done anything at all, or is EU being faced with a delaying tactic until a repair is effected.

Either way, not a very good advertisment for BT Broadband.

[waltergmw]

Hi TD,

Remember that repair engineers just fill in a record in a database and can't communicate directly with Asia, even assuming a human being there was able to influence anything. You just have to pester them politely, if rather testily, until the problem is solved. Perhaps you might insist the problem was escalated ?

Kind regards,
Walter

[tuftedduck]

Thanks for the comment, waltergmw.

We have a result...

Engineer visited the exchange this afternoon, did the needful and now all eight local BT Broadband EUs are happy bunnies........my own friends who first raised the issue are synching at about 8200 mbps, the max they can get on this exchange.

Thank you all for your interest and advices.