>> how did you arrange such a visit and under what pretense?
I asked and it got approval right from the very top. - Bens aware of the site, and my history with adsl.
It actually took many months to arrange from start to finish as various people were involved, (since late last year and I amost thought it had been forgotten about at one point)
There was an unavoidable delay due to work being done for 21CN in one of the larger exchanges I visited.... Then it was a case of arranging a date when staff from both BT Openreach and BT Wholesale were available.
The actual visits surpassed my expectations and it started off quite structured, but then turned out quite relaxed when I think some of the staff realised I wasn't just a n00b and already understood quite a lot about adsl as a whole... and the conversations were 2-way and very free-flowing. Also remember BT is chinese walled and each BT staff only knows or is an expert in their section so its rare in a way to get an occasion "when it all comes together" and be able to ask a question to both BT Wholesale and BT Openreach staff at the same time. At which point I must stress no rules were broken nor has anything been revealed which shouldn't have been.
Theres also a lot more info I learned mostly for my own curiosity such as during a "2 hour slot" with an adsl field engineer.. it would be pretty hard to do a write up about that - despite I found it very interesting to see the process of what would happen if there was a fault on my line and tracing my own line through the exchange etc.
Its also interesting to see the rules and processes in place so that for eg BT Retail dont have an unfair advantage over any other supplier.
Then theres also info on that page that hasnt just come from the visits.. for example finding out more info about the Fujitsu kit which took further research from other sources.
One thing did become apparent from the visits and thats the guys I spoke to were great and all of them were a credit to BT.
