The engineer from OR arrived on Saturday afternoon. Janet really needed my help in speaking the tech words to the engineer, so I wobbled out of my bed and was manoeuvred into the infrastructure- and servers room, aka Janet's dressing room. I explained very carefully to the engineer what the fault was, its importance and the background. He really ‘got it’; it was quite clear that he understood perfectly, but he didn’t have a solution. Fortunately there was something else wrong besides the agreed appalling u/s sync rate, which was a number of ES upstream during a 5 min long standard test. (Is it called a "close-out" test?) Because of this fail on ES and the general mysterious vexing nature of the problem, he phoned BTW support 2nd level or whatever it’s called; again couldn’t hear half of it; Anyway our man was escalated past the first-line representatives, but couldn’t get anything useful. He thought about changing target SNRM but I told him that that wouldn’t make a remotely big enough difference, which indeed turned out to be the case. He asked me about capping of the upstream - I had forgotten that there is such a thing for ADSL2 upstream - and I said that no one had applied any such thing, and it would show up in clueless’ logs anyway.
After we had discussed it for a little while, our engineer then left, saying he was heading to the exchange.
Whatever he then did, he somehow had
fixed the problem and phoned back, so I gave him the good news that I agreed that it was looking superb at my end too! Even if he didn’t know how; he
did something. Back up to 399 kbps @ 6dB. So
a superb result.
Because the sound quality was better, yet totally appalling, the engineer's call to BTW was ‘audible’ to me (barely) on the phone’s loudspeaker. I asked the engineer about the audio quality of these calls and he said it was a continuing pain in the neck. At times we couldn’t make out anything at all, due to a combination of bad call quality and very heavy Indian accents. It was very interesting to get an insight into what an engineer gets up to when he/she is in a call; I’ve never been in attendance before.
So line 3 has been saved from the chop.
I just wish there were fewer mysteries.