The engineer turned up and made it clear that he was just running tests on the line, sending the results to my service provider, who would assess them, and then decide what action was needed. He kept emphasising service provider for some reason even though I’d told him I was with BT and there was a HH5 in front him. Sods law that the line was fine when he tried the quiet line test, but he hooked up his meter to check the line for a fault. This is where it gets odd, he said the line passed all the tests and was fine, but asked if I had a problem with my broadband (I hadn’t reported a broadband fault to BT, or mentioned broadband to him) I said that yes it was playing up a bit and he said that I should get my ‘service provider’ to send out a broadband engineer because the intermittent fault with my landline was possibly to do with a broadband equipment fault, possibly at the exchange.
This afternoon I ran a BT Wholesale speed test and below is a capture of the result. So back on to BT who have asked me to wait 3 days because the tests the engineer ran this morning will have caused resets on my line that will need to settle. They have asked me to monitor the connection and they will ring back Friday evening to see how things are.
If you’ve made your way through that lot above I have a couple of questions that a knowledgeable person may have the answers to:
Could the engineer see something on his meter that might not affect the voice part of the line, but mess with broadband?
Would anything the engineer did during his tests reset anything or are BT saying wait 3 days in case he upset the DLM by disconnecting me for a few minutes?Having not been on-site, I can only go off your comments to try and draw a conclusion as to the type of engineering visit you have had ??
It sounds like you have had a CDTA (Conscious Decision To Appoint) engineering visit ??
This basically is built by the SP (Service Provider). As
BT Openreach, we work for and on behalf of all SP's with no favouritism shown to
any particular one, so even though
BT Retail are your provider, we are still at liberty to refer to them as your SP.
Of course, we are not breaking any of Ofcom's 'Equivalence rulings' by calling the SP by name, it's just sometimes there are re-sellers involved and it can get confusing for all concerned ?.
So, back to the CDTA task. The protocol that the engineer has to follow (as agreed by the SP), is to perform a PQT (Pair Quality Test) via a JDSU/EXFO, and to listen to the QLT (Quiet Line Test).
If both tests pass, then the engineer has to leave immediately. This is the ruling.
A helluva lot of CDTA's are raised by the SP when in fact a Broadband SFI task is what is required, which is probably why the engineer asked if you were having BB issues ??. However, on your particular CDTA you comment that audible noise
was heard by your SP hence their obvious route of raising a CDTA at this point in the process.
As mooted above, due to the constraints on a CDTA task, I very much doubt the engineer would have connected his meter in DSL mode to look for error-counts, SNR wobbles etc ?? It is this next level of engineering (BB SFI task) that generally helps in locating metallic path issues, like HR (High-Resistance) faults which your circuit appears to be suffering from ?
The '3-day wait to settle' I fear, is just another script-read protocol they have to follow ? But it's worth noting that if the DSL cord is unplugged from the telephone socket/Hub
before the actual power is switched off to the Hub, then the DLM won't receive the 'Dying gasp' message the Hub would normally send. This 'gasp' is sent to suspend DLM interference.
So the script may be there to satisfy this particular instance ?
Hope this makes sense.
