Update - phone line fault - fixed

[Dave Baker]

Thanks again for all the helpful advice on here. After putting up with the crackling line and internet dropping out for about two weeks I finally agreed to an engineer visit even though BT kept telling me they could see no fault on a line test.

Engineer arrived this morning and immediately found a corroded connection at the top of the telephone pole. Having swapped my cabling over to a spare line which he said there were plenty of up there I then had no signal at all on the phone. Couldn't even get a ring tone.

So he says there must also be a problem inside the house. How on earth says I can there now be no line at all unless the wrong wires are now connected from the pole to the house? Anyway he was adamant he'd done the wiring right up the pole so I told him my only worry was if he said there was any internal fault on the job report I'd get a charge from BT. No worries he says it'll all go down as an external fault so he came indoors and pronounced the master socket kaput.

So you can imagine my skepticism that a socket that has always at least worked to some degree, albeit apparently with a bad connection on the telegraph pole, suddenly doesn't work at all with a brand new connection on the pole.

Anyway he puts a new faceplate in on the indoors master socket and it all works again! I'm mystified but my ADSL speed has now leapt from an average of 2mbs and an occasional best of about 4mbs straight up to 6 mbs so all in all a result.

I still wonder if he'd initially re-connected the two wires the wrong way round on the external socket so they were in the wrong places on the internal one but if anyone can come up with an alternative explanation of why I suddenly also needed a new internal socket I'd be interested.

[John Williamson]

Something that was about to fail was killed by the proper line voltage now being there, maybe. Strange things often happen when old wiring is diturbed.

As long as it works.

[John Rumm]

That sounds like a result.... ;-)

Well there are a limited number of permutations for connecting two wires to two terminals - and both ought to work!

When you say "new faceplate" - I assume he replaced the whole faceplate (i.e. both top and bottom bits) and not just the removable bottom bit?

[Ian Jackson]

Even though one wire is at 0V, and the other carries -48VDC, aren't phone lines supposed to work *either* way round?

[John Rumm]

They are indeed, and doing so is one of the requirements of BABT approval in the days that mattered...

[Dave Liquorice]

Well like you say if he has swapped the pair used in the dropwire (pole top to your house) and not changed the pair in the house it just ain't going to work...

Face saving? Swapped to the correct to pair in the dropwire whilst changing the face plate? Which bit did he actually change? Just the lower, detachable half or the upper and lower bits? Most BT engineers are not daft enough to swap pairs at one end of a cable and not the other...

[Dave Baker]

I'm thinking so.

Swapped to the correct to pair in the dropwire whilst

My old faceplate was one piece. Not sure about the new one which doesn't actually fit the old socket properly I see but that's something for another day.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Ian Jackson writes

They do. The wires are referred to as the A and B legs. I forget which is supposed to be 0v and which at -48v. Never been sure why they are supposed to be a certain way round.

I have a BT line tester which has a "REV" light to indicate that polarity is reversed. Whenever I've come across a line like this I have corrected it but am not sure if it's actually needed.

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Dave Baker writes

He's replaced your old one-piece socket with an NTE5 (the one with the user-detachable part that can be unplugged to isolate any extension wiring to aid in diagnosing faults.)

It's 'regularisation' - bringing the installation up to current standard. Actually, he's almost certainly fitted an NTE5a which contains modifications that would have contributed to your ADSL speed improvement in addition to fixing the dodgy connection on the pole.

[Huge]

Because a line reversal is used to unlock the coin bars on a payphone?

[Lobster]

But wouldn't that be face *wasting*?

David

[Dave Baker]

Just been out to have a shuftie inside the master socket again. The dropwire contains about 6 or 7 wires of which only two are used. I'm pretty sure they used to be a red and black pair and I can see those still have protruding shiny copper ends as though they were recently in use. All the others had always been snipped off flush. Now it's using a green and orange pair (maybe - cos I'm colourblind which doesn't help).

Those are then clipped directly to the two out of four wires coming from the inside line so at worst I guess he could have reversed the polarity to the inside socket but it seems that shouldn't matter. Guess I'll never know.

It was a rather weird experience all round though. When he arrived at the door he asked what the problem was and I'd barely got half a dozen words out about the crackling line when he just wandered off right in the middle of my sentence to go and look at the outside socket round the back of the house. Left me standing in the porch in my socks mid speech wondering what the hell he was up to.

Later he asked what other sockets I had in use and I said there was a line out to the garage and a second socket in the downstairs hall (master is in the lounge directly across the wall from the external socket outside) but neither of those had anything in use on them. So he just didn't bother reconnecting them having pulled all the wiring apart during the fix!

So when he's finally got the main phone working I grab an old corded phone and say I'll just go and check the socket in the hall for a good signal. "I thought you said you didn't use that?" he asks.

"Well it isn't in use at the moment but I want it working!"

"Oh - hmmmpf - give me a minute" and he connects it back up again. Very odd.

Then I go out and have a look inside the external socket and the line to the garage has just been left hanging. Same bloody story. Finally we get it all connected back up again as it had been but he'd have been quite happy to bugger off and leave me with just the main phone line.

20 minutes after he'd finished and after having had a good check on the internet and making sure it was all working fine I go into the kitchen to make a coffee and he's still sat outside in the van chatting on his mobile, killing time no doubt before the next job. Exactly what the water company guy who came to clear a blocked sewer did a few years ago.

I wonder how much we'd actually have to pay for these sort of services if they weren't run so terribly inefficiently with every job being clocked out at twice as long as was actually spent on it.

Anyway my ADSL has been steady at 6016 kbps ever since rather than mostly

2000 and at best 4000 so I'm not complaining - at least as long as BT don't try sending me a bill.

[Dave Liquorice]

No by pretending there is another fault that requires the faceplate to be replaced he can quietly switch to the correct pair in the dropwire without having to admit (losing face) that he only swapped pairs at one one of said dropwire.

[John Rumm]

I can see the logic to using a new pair from the pole if they were available. That would obviously involve a change at the master socket, and it also sounds like he upgraded your setup to a NTE5 style socket as well.

[snip]

Well since this wall all before and upto the master socket, you will presumably not be charged anything. When allocating jobs like this, they also need to allow for the fact he might need to visit every junction between your house and the local exchange.

Can't see how they can.

[Another John]

Whenever I have had broadband problems (mainly: line dropping when we put the phone down after a call) I have never *dared* call BT, in case they decide that there is "no fault". I was told by Plusnet, last time we had such an episode (it's happened a couple of times in our B/B history), that the BT charge for a call-out (and "no fault found") is now £180!!

So basically they're saying: "Go one: take a punt on whether it's our line or your own set-up."

Along with Plusnet's diagnostic and helpline support, I've always determined that the problem is "somewhere" in the Great Beyond past our BT faceplate. However I've never dared call 'em up: I might get a good engineer, or I might get a bad one who simply declares: "Nah: it's not our gear mate".

Each time this has happened (3 times in about 5 years IIRC), I've ended up letting the matter drop (because the fault is bloody annoying, but not crippling). And the fault has eventually gone away (the last time, it went away, and as in Dave's case, our linespeed has gone up

*dramatically*).

My guess is that Plusnet raised the problem with BT, sooner or later someone tinkered about at the exchange, and -- possibly accidentally -- fixed our fault.

To be fair, I empathise with both BT and the ISPs: they must have thousands of calls coming in every day from people who have *no clue whatever* about how any of "it" works, and will, for example, interpret a switched-off router as an "Internet Fault", and ring the ISP (or BT).

In fact, it's a bloody miracle how it does work. It seems to me (who has spent decades working in computing and IT) to be an awfully fragile chain on which to build the national infrastructure. All around us, corporate businesses are closing down branches and shops, to be replaced by ... two tiny wires!

[whoops, sorry: got completely carried away there.]

John

[Mike Clarke]

[snip]

They might try. An interesting article at //aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband-sfi.html suggests that BT can resort to some very unreasonable terms and conditions to extract this charge.

[Frank Erskine]

I was once told by an Openreach engineer that once when a number of NTE5s were damaged by lightning he was supposed to insist on payment for replacements; the customer was then expected to claim against his/her insurance.

[John Rumm]

Not that its in any way conclusive, but personally I have always found that they err on the side of not charging. I had one visit when I had lost broadband completely, they sent a new wireman who did not really know what was going on. I demoed that it did not work with two routers and two microfilters. So he went up the pole etc and fiddled but came back claiming to have not actually done anything. Tried the BB again and it worked. So I told him he had obviously done something since it now worked. Apparently he went away and recorded the fault as being down to me having a faulty microfilter! They made no attempt to charge for that even (although that may be because it conflicted with the initial detailed description of the fault I had given).

[Mike Tomlinson]

In article , Dave Baker writes

*If* he claims in his report that the fault was caused by your extension wiring (anything after the master socket) you can be sure they will send you a bill, so be on the lookout.

They are only responsible for providing service up to and including the master socket. Anything else is chargeable.

[Lobster]

Whoosh...