Hi there,
I've just reached the end of a long ADSL saga and I'd like to share my experiences in case anyone else finds it helpful in the future. For one reason and another the whole thing took 2 months to play out, so I'll give you the quick summary:
This fault appeared out of the blue:
- My modem was successfully establishing a DSL session with the exchange, but could not establish a PPP session.
- Neither of the BT test accounts (http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/bttest.htm) was able to authenticate successfully.
- Although my modem thought it was in-sync, whenever the ISP ran a test they claimed the modem was not in-sync. This turned out to be significant.
My ISP (Coop Broadband) were friendly but uncoordinated and not terribly knowledgeable. After exhausting their fault-finding script ("Have you tried restoring the factory settings?") they ordered an engineer visit from BT. The first BT engineer visited the exchange, concluded there was a problem there, and said another engineer would be required to fix it. The second BT engineer visited the exchange, concluded there was no problem there, and said another engineer would need to visit my house. By this stage I'd had plenty of time to read around and was pretty sure something was wrong with the patching / jumper / mapping / whatever at the exchange:
So I collared the 3rd guy when he appeared on the doorstep, explained the symptoms, and suggested he might like to visit the exchange to check how my line was patched / jumpered / mapped. 30 minutes later everything sprang back into life.
What have I learned from this? Do your research, try to understand the fault, and make specific requests to BT / your ISP. Don't expect them to take ownership of the issue or demonstrate any problem-solving ability. Good luck!
