HI swampiesue,
I believe most BT broadband engineers are provided with broadband test equipment which they have been trained to use.
In simplistic terms, a BT phone engineer will make sure that there is an electrical circuit between your house and the telephone exchange upon which a narrow band signal will work to provide speech, fax and slow dial-up modem services, whereas a BT Broadband engineer will investigate many things including both permanent and intermittent spurious noise caused by radio frequency interference, cross-talk between different telephone circuits, and high resistance line faults. In other words the more complicated things to do with transmitting a much wider frequency spectrum (i.e. broadband signals). BT Broadband engineers are trained to investigate the telephone line in much more detail. As these things are more complicated BT broadband engineers may well have to make several visits. Very difficult faults are often "escalated" to highly experienced engineers such as Ezzer. In my experience these types of fault can easily take a month or even longer to cure.
It's important to realise that all engineers are tasked with many faults one after the other and, except in special circumstances, are most unlikely to be looking after your problem continuously. That is why that if you can provide and record evidence, using the test software often discussed on this web site, as well as keeping a BT activity record, the fault(s) can sometimes be more quickly repaired. In these circumstances an ISP who has a proper on-line fault log that you and they can access can be a major advantage. Those on very long lines which are more prone to faults or poor performance will usually benefit more from such ISP's services, even though they appear a little more expensive.
It's also worth noting that the very cheap ISP's do not have the resources to to conduct these types of investigations and will probably try to ignore the more complex faults. BT are dealing with thousands of difficulties on the vast copper network they operate and do rely on the ISPs performing basic tests; BT also expect you and the ISP to inform them if the fault has not been fixed.
Kind regards,
Walter
