I spend a couple of hours this morning at an elderly friend’s house in the village, she had recently ordered Broadband on her line and had asked me to set up her BT home hub. Her activation date was last Tuesday, but something has gone wrong as she lost her land line that afternoon and the hub won’t sync either. There is no dial tone, just some background hiss on the line and all incoming calls are answered by BT 1571. There are two phone sockets, both of which I would describe as extension sockets, there is no modern master socket in the house.
I called BT on her behalf and was taken through some fault finding, but this immediately stalled as I could not test from the master socket as there wasn’t one. The person I spoke to had difficulty accepting this and I tried to explain that the phone installation is quite old and predates these sockets. However, the only option appeared to be to arrange an engineer visit, but with the caveat that the usual fee would be payable if the fault was fond within her premises. I suppose it is not beyond the possibilities of coincidence that a fault developed on the exact same day as activation, but this appears to be unlikely as everything was previously working ok.
So after this ramble, two questions.
1. Does the activation of broadband involve re-jumpering, patching the line and thus have the possibility of causing such a fault?
2. When the engineer visits will he install a modern master socket and will this incur such a charge?
Worse still she has to wait until next Thursday for the engineer, unnerving for someone in their eighties.
Thanks.
