Thanks Walter.
Funnily enough, your point was reinforced by the broadband engineer who visited today. He was 3 hours late, but had just come from a job for a Sky customer the resolution of which took 6 hours. DSL connection was present and correct but internet pages would not load. Sky said it was an OR problem. The OR SMC said the connection was good and that it was a Sky problem, the onsite OR engineer's test kit reported no faults. Many hours later (with the customer and the onsite engineer stuck in the middle of this conundrum) a port change fixed the problem. So it was an OR network problem. But the deficient equipment continues to check out OK. So whats wrong where?
The test kit obviously has limitations, and that's not comforting when considering the new BT policy of trying to charge the EU if no fault found anywhere.
I think he was glad of my job as a rest cure. Quick test with the JDSU. 100% error free. Yesterday's PSTN engineers work yesterday is obviously good. DLM reset and I'm immediately back to the same throughout as before the PSTN fault.
Until the next time.......
No, it wasn't an OR Network fault it was an equipment fault, two completely different things I'm afraid.
I've had the same scenario as you have had just a couple of times, whereby to all intents and purposes the tester/modem is 'talking' to the DSLAM and passing data error-free, but the EU can't access web-pages. Protocol is to contact OR's Helpdesk and request our side of the circuits 'Build' details, which are the C-Tag and S-Tag parameters. We then get passed to BT Wholesale who confirm these parameters against their side of the 'Build'.
On both occasions, the 'Build' was correct. The only way we found to solve the issue was to perform a 'Lift & Shift' (New port) to a completely different card. Even porting to a 'Spare' on the same card didn't work. These were both ECI vendors as well I might add.
The problem, along with other issues, was found to be the V-TUC cards in the VDSL Cabinet that ECI had provided. Their latest firmware upgrade appeared to be incompatible with the V-TUC V3 cards, and so a programme was put in place locally to swap out all these cards for the V-TUC V2 cards. I actually rode shotgun with the guy that did it, and umpteen issues we had went away overnight. The very same card situation had also caused major problems in York, the ECI engineer told me, as he had been there the week before doing 'Swap outs'.