My Broadband is fixed!

New Year, New post!

From this to to this   read on…

Broadband speed is something that is being talked about a lot these days. What does ‘up to 8 MB’s’ really mean? Well unless you live right next to the telephone exchange you’re never going to get anywhere near to 8 MB’s.

What do I get? On average around 4 MB, sometimes I might even get to 4.5 MB. I’m with BT Broadband on Option 3 and have my broadband connection with the Reading South Exchange.

Although speed is an issue with any connection, consistency of service for me is even more important, whether you have 1MB, 2MB, 4MB or even 8MB! If you don’t have a consistent connection (or any connection at all), then even 16MB (if that was possible) becomes useless as a service. As I work from home, it is even more important!

If your not satisfied, why not change ISP, I hear some say! I suppose with the high number of ISP providers in the UK today, it might pay to shop around and get another deal, but moving your ISP is not as easy (or from a work point of view, convenient) as some would have you believe, it’s a bit more than just getting a new MAC code!

Why am I still with BT? Well in the end they did fix the problem, which was in the Reading South exchange itself (despite me being told initially by BT support many times to change my own line filter! But that’s another story!), perhaps it was through my persistence of calls giving feedback and other diagnostics information that I set them over the course of three months!

Here’s some background info that I kept about the problems. I have two BT lines into my house and one is dedicated to Broadband through a NETGEAR DG834G v2 router (backed up by a spare) with only a single telephone connected through a filter (I have spares of these as well). I work in IT, so being prepared is one of my fixations – by the way, when did you last back up your own PC?

Anyway, last year (2007) up until around May I had been having consistent connection and good speeds , even got up close to 6MB at one stage as can be seen by this graph collected by me monitoring the NETGEAR Log and using a number of online broadband speed testers (Audit My PC, One Stop Click, and SpeedTest.Net to get a good average.

However all was not well at the Reading South exchange as over the next two months, connections kept dropping and average speeds became more erratic.

When making calls to BT customer support I was always met with the usual liturgy of ‘have you changed you filter?‘ and ‘have you rebooted your router?‘ and ‘do you have any other equipment on the line?’.

One thing I insisted on when speaking to the various support agents – just how many do BT have for this function? was that the agent write something in their customer support call log about my problems and eventually they started to do this. I think that this one action helped me prove in the end that the problem was with their equipment and not mine.

July moved into August and September with similar issues including a false fix in August.

By this time we had moved onto BT Line testing!! I am not sure if it’s me, but it seems that when I am talking to the BT customer support person on the phone using the same BT broadband line (via a working filter – don’t ask me to change it) surely that must mean that the line is working!

No! comes the reply. We have to carry our more detailed tests to check what speed your line can support! So while they check the line, I look at the NETGEAR settings again and yes I am still connected to BT as I have an ISP allocated IP address and an ISP allocated Gateway Address and ISP allocated DNS numbers and the Router says that I have a DownStream connection speed of 8152 kbps!

All this and my browser still has a blank screen (apart from the ‘this page can’t display‘ message that is)! The agent comes back and says that the line test passed okay and that my line can support up to 2MB speed and is working correctly!!! However, my browser screen is still blank from any number of web addresses! The agent then starts to as if I have changed the filter…! Oh! dear have I broken the phone?

We move on to October and November…

 

It seems that either my filter is really defective or Reading South exchange is close to meltdown! Finally after more support calls, stupid questions, more line tests and checking that they are now able to read back to me from the call log what I had previously reported, in the middle of November, I am told that finally the call is being escalated to a specialist team that manage the engineers who visit the various exchanges in the UK! BT technical staff actually in the UK!!

At last I feel that we are moving somewhere, surprisingly at first this group of engineers seem unaware of all of the issues that I’ve had, but then suddenly they are able to read the log files that I made the other support group collect. After a number of sensible technical discussions, I am told that an Engineer will now visit the Reading South exchange site, make some investigations and report back.

On the evening of 27th November, I receive a phone call (yes they rang me!) to say that a fault had been found and would I please check my connection speed. I checked and it’s was up at 3.7 MB. We agreed that I would monitor the speed and consistency of connection over the next few days during which they were now ringing me twice a day to check on the connection quality. As can be seen from the end of the November chart, things begin to get better.

But what about December and January to date?

As can be seen from the charts below, December was the first month since May that I had not experienced any drop in the connection or a drop in speed below 3.5 MB! This has now carried on into January 2008 with a slight speed increase up to an average of 4.0 MB! Stability at last and with a good speed!!

  

Interesting point; I am still using the same filter, the same router, the same cables, the same phone connected to my broadband line as I had been back at the beginning to May 07 (and previous months) and I have not had to let anyone remotely connect to my PC to fix anything!

It may seem to have been a long haul to get to this point, but in the end perseverance paid off. Yes, I could have swapped ISP’s, but would I have got any better service? Based on what we all read about ISP’s in the press, perhaps not.

Perhaps someone at BT might read this and care to comment.

Some suggestions/conclusions that I can pass one:-

• Make sure that you have eliminated any other suspect items on your broadband line that could be causing an error by taking your Fax, Answer Machine and/or Alarm system of the phone line before you call.
• Keep a spare filter and phone lines handy to swap out before you call if you can afford it buy a spare Router.
• When you make your first support call, try as hard as you can to make them take down all your details and that they enter this into their call log system – it tracks calls against your broadband phone number, you can check that they did this, next time you call, that is if you have to.
• Regional accents can be very hard to understand on the phone, if you cannot understand what the support agent is saying, ask them to speak more slowly and clearly – they will do this.
• The support agent may ask some simple (and seemingly stupid to you) questions; at the end of the day these ‘front-line’ telephone support agents are working from a script and probably know less about broadband than you do.
• If they cannot fix the issue immediately they will need to gather further information. You should know how to log on to your router to access log file information, at the end of the day it is your equipment. Read your router manual and understand how it (and broadband works, here is a good tutorial on Broadband in the UK. Give as much information as possible and don’t fobbed off by lame excuses, that it could be the filter, phone cable, fax machine, because you will have already discounted these items. Won’t you?
• I’m am always very reticent about letting remote people log on to my PC, try to avoid this.
• Above all, you have to have patience and perseverance.

The problem can be fixed, it’s a matter of determining (diagnosing) where the fault is. I agree that in some rare cases all that may be left to do is to move ISP’s

This is not the first Broadband fault that I have had, and I am sure that it won’t be the last, but it certainly was the one that took the longest to fix. I’ll also be posting my monthly chart from now on as an update to this post. Now, if only I could get a faster speed!!!! Happy Browsing.