So, my father has been suffering with a line that has a lot of crackling on it, and various engineers have been out over the years and never been able to fully fix the issue.
The latest visit for example, new faceplate was installed, engineer called it done. Fast forward a few weeks and my dad's been complaining a lot about disconnections, so I went up to see him today (he lives an hour away) and took my bag full of routers/modems in case it wasn't the line.
Picked the phone up, noise is present, clear as day. At this juncture it is obvious I now need to call Sky and escalate the problem. Thinking I'd be in for a battle, I explain the predicament and the lady at Sky could even hear the noise on the line as I was talking to her. Could see we'd raised faults before, and insisted that this time she would escalate it as a repeat fault to Openreach and it would be taken care of. Fair enough, figured it would be a few days and we'd just have to wait.
2 hours later an OpenReach engineer has arrived, heard the noise, and established there was indeed fault, and it was 27m away. The distance from the socket in the house to the telegraph pole in the street is about that distance, so, picks up his tools, gets the van to the rear of the house and sets about investigating the pole. Sure enough, we pop out the back garden to see what's going on and he's already recrimped the telephone line with gel-filled crimps (clearly never been done before - the house is probably 175-200 years old, so who knows what was used to terminate all the telephone lines together) and says line is clear as day from up here! Seems water ingress had corroded it before, as there were no gels used to crimp/terminate the line.
Sure enough, I ask him nicely if he could do a DLM reset for us because the resulting disconnections over the previous weeks have caused the sync to nosedive, and is more than happy to do so, sync is now the full 55/10. He managed to fix something that has been an issue for many years.
So, big shout out to Sky for their prompt escalation, and I cannot fault the response from Openreach, line is now stable and my father is ecstatic. I'm pleased, he's in his late 70's and uses the internet an awful lot, so I'm glad this has (finally) been nailed!
