Open Reach.

[Andy Burns]

Does TotalCare "rub off" onto the broadband provisioned on the line, or does it mean you can only report issues when there's a voice fault?

[tony sayer]

You really ought to invite those nice Pikey's to come and have a look at the local phone cables under the cover of darkness of course;)...

[tony sayer]

Those must be the ones thinking of early retirement;)...

[Dave Liquorice]

The cable in question is direct buried so no chance of pulling very much out of the ground before it snapped. I think it's more than 20 pair but not by many. The whole thing, insulation, armour and cores is only about 20 mm dia.

One failure a year or so back was when a local dug it up with a digger. That looks like an odd root, twang, whoops, roots aren't full of pretty coloured strands... All BT had to do was put in a pair of joint posts about 15' apart and a new bit of cable between the two.

[Dave Liquorice]

It's really only POTS faults but the chances are a local end fault will affect the POTS service not just the ADSL. Our local end faults generally kill the POTS as the signaling loop is broken. 50% of the time the ADSL will continue to work albeit at 1 Mbps or less.

The occasional times there has been a internet access problem or fault it's not been the local end but the DSLAM, the fibre backhaul or an ESR fault. Openreaches network monitoring seems to spot these pretty quickly and they go about fixing them straight away any time of day or night.

[The Natural Philosopher]

The one exception I had to that was very poor broadband, first they sent out a man to look at my installation and the wires to the nearest cabinet, which he improved, but the fault persisted, then they looked at the circuit back to the exchange, which they improved, but didn't fix the problem, and then miraculously the problem went away one Monday morning leaving me with a broadband speed far higher than anything I had had before.

I had been telling them that a high noise in the *uplink* was almost certainly a DSLAM issue...