BT to repair faults before they occur

[Dave Liquorice]

Taken from an email from BT really giving notice of the price rises but trying to hide that behind with service improvements.

"We promise to fix line faults faster than before: We want to put things right quickly if something goes wrong with your phone line. That's why we're making a commitment to fix any line faults that need an engineer 24 hours faster than we do today."

I have Total Care, they already fix faults by the end of the next day

365 days of the year. More often than not a fault is fixed in less than 24 hours so they must be fixing 'em before they happen.

For a residential line on Standard Care I guess that it will now only take up to 6 days for a fault to be looked at by a linesman (not neccesarily fixed).

[Huge]

If my experience is anything to go by, they'll satisfy this by creating faults that they can (fail to) fix.

[spuorgelgoog]

With overnight automatic line testing faults can be identified and fixed before you are aware of them.

Owain

[Huge]

I don't believe that BT are capable of this.

[Capitol]

Not IME.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Huge escribió:

They do do it. There's some very impressive diagnostics built into the line cards that can be run remotely and lines are tested overnight. Your 'phone provider probably has access to some of the online tools to aid in diagnosis before faults are escalated to Openreach.

In the days when there were still mechanical bells, you may recall your phone sometimes giving a soft 'ding' in the middle of the night. That was the automated line testing at work.

[spuorgelgoog]

If you weren't aware of them you wouldn't have experienced it :-)

Owain

[Capitol]

When I've had a fault, BT claimed all was perfect. Line testing only works within limits. The classic one was the son in law's line which BT claimed was perfect, it took the grandchild to point out to them that the line was on the ground across 2 fields and the phone didn't work! That was about 18 months ago.

[Brian Gaff]

Yes a friend of mine has a weird falt that manifests itself at the other end not their end. People she rings get little breaks in the adio sometimes filled with bursts of dtmf sometimes fragments of someone elses conversation. Occasionally it will drop the connection and my end will say the other caller has cleared BT have tested it and can find no fault. that is probably due to the fact that if I ring her, the problem is not there, its only when she rings somebody else. Brian

[Dave Liquorice]

Nor mine, and yes the line is/was on the daily routine test as I'd hear the distinctive sequence of pips as the test occured. The majority of our faults occur at any one of the half dozen or so joint posts/chambers in the last mile of cable. It's old, aluminium and brittle, linesman opens a joint post to fix/trace a fault and puts on two more. Normally takes a week before there isn't an Openreach van somewhere along that mile. Mind you they are slowly working their way along it completely remaking everything, so in some respects are repairing faults before they occur.

[Huge]

Oh, I'm sure there are. I simply don't believe that BT are capable of organising and scheduling the work. In 41 years of employment, they are the least competent organisation I have ever had the misfortune to have to deal with.

[dennis]

The BT test network can identify many faults and tests just about every line every so often. I actually had to look into faults on one of the original cards about 25 years ago. I was amazed they got as much done as they did using a two layer PCB but it really needed an earth plane as the 8086 CPU caused a lot of noise. They redid it on four layers and it worked much better.