We had the same problem a couple of months ago - ADSL worked fine (I didn't actually check data rates but there was no slowdown evident) but there was no voice service. The phone would ring on incoming calls, but no connection and no dial tone. Not sure if the GF was more annoyed at the loss of the voice service or the lack of loss of the ADSL service :-)
Standard advice in uk.telecom in situations of this sort is to contact Ben Verwaayen's office by email. A google groups search will get you the address.
Does that actually achieve anything? I receive many, many apologies, from a whole bunch of different people at BT - but they are totally meaningless unless backed by some action.
The trick is to make fixing your problem less hassle than having you keep rattling cages. I rarely go 'up the chain of command' more than one step before 'phoning head office and asking for the MD.
On one occassion I contacted the US main office of a 'white goods' maker as it was after hours in the UK. European MD rang me that evening (from Italy) and appliance was fixed the next day, at a time convenient to me. I also got a free extended warranty on the fridge until I had a fault free year!
Difficult - the reason we have so many lines is because we really can't afford to have any downtime - so the worst it's been so far is down to one single line, but even that's good enough for two of us to work off. So no 'losses' apart from the many hours spent on the phone to BT (now that probably comes to several thousand pounds; but that's a different story).
Yeah, that was at the master socket with everything disconnected.
After Parcel Force lost a computer I'd sent to my brother, they pulled every single delaying trick in the book to avoid paying up. One letter direct to the MD got a full settlement of my claim instantly.
Great! I wasn't questioning your suggestion - it sounds reasonable enough - I was just asking whether you knew how effective it might be. I think I'll deffinitely give it a try, thanks.
At the very low radio frequencies used by ADSL (~30 - ~500 kHz, AIUI) the signal attenuation involved in 'jumping the gap' in a broken wire will be huge[1]. What's far more likely to be happening is that the stray capacitance of the o/c wire (on the subscriber's side of the break) to earth, or, more particularly, to all the other pairs in a multi-pair cable, is providing a 'return' connection.
Well someone needs to point out that a one-wire connection still depends on the flow of electric current ;-) How do you think aerials work?
[1] The ADSL modem in my roota usually claims an SNR margin of around 30 dB, so clearly there is a lot of margin in the system. Capacitive coupling across the gap in a broken wire at these frequencies though is going to introduce probably 60+ dB of attenuation - so that isn't the answer...
Getting up to 8Mbps through the system with 30dB noise margin took years of design effort and years arguing in standards forums about what the best method was. If you think of it another way, with 0dB margin it is difficult to get much through at all.
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