"16Mb/s in and of itself fits that description and merely indicates a relatively high level of electrical resistance (a long line or perhaps aluminium involved). "
When did 180 metres become a long line? (external cable comes into the building and terminates in a NT5 block with a single item plugged into it, no internal cabling. That block's been replaced 4 times in the last 17 years but no change - of course). I can almost read the numbers stencilled on the DSLAM cabinets from my front window
I know it's lead sheathed paper in this area because I've stuck my head in the cabinets a few times when Openreach guys have been onsite. The older guys are more than happy for customers to see how bad things are (there's a notable air leak in the lead sheathing too with the pressure gauges almost at zero) whilst the newer ones are frequently openly hostile to anyone displaying telecoms engineering & design qualiifications (my hypothesis is that they feel threatened)
The funny part is that the router (fritzbox) is currently reporting a 27 metre bridge tap on some days, a 7 metre bridge tap on others (Depending on the weather it decreases as things dry out) - but BTOR's 'techs' "Can't find anything wrong with the cable" - which made for an interesting discussion yesterday when I asked about the reported bridge tap on the line(*)
(*) Bridge taps are not much of a problem on voice circuits, but on DSL lines they can act as a half/quarter-wave shorted stub segment and wipe out usability of entire frequency bands - DSL has a lot more in common with RF engineering than people realise - this is why it's so critical they're traced and eliminated. In an area with 50+ year old street distributors, this is more of a problem than people might realise, particularly when cowboys without RF training start playing "Musical cable pairs"
This is a constant problem across the industry in many countries if you use "contractors" who are paid to close tickets as quickly as possible and each complaint is raised as a new fault with no link to cable or pair history.
It becomes a nice earner for contractors to "farm" a faulty cable in an area as easy income and play "musical chairs" with the good/bad pairs between distirbution pits. When I ran an ISP in New Zealand I was able to collate customer complaints, pointing my Telco sales rep to clusters of faults in small areas which would otherwise not be dealt with - this resulted in making "enemies" out of a number of contracting firms in smaller towns who saw their "easy income" drop by 80-90% when old crufty cable runs were replaced
I have to say that not ALL BTOR tech staff are awful - many older ex-BT staff care deeply about quality of service, but they're vastly outnumbered by cowboy cheapies who only care about closing tickets as quickly as possible so they get paid
It was one of these older (EX GPO/BT) guys who reported finding the water damage in the DSLAM and commented on the "well known" issues with water leaks in the ECI cabinets. Openreach have been vehemently denying this was ever stated but I kept an audio recording of the call
Unfortunately , his work in redoing all the joints and replacing jumpers lasted about 6 weeks until the last round of bad weather in this part of the country (a big problem for intermittent weather-related faults is that BTOR don't show up for severa days after a fault is reported, giving time for wet lines to try out - particularly in areas prone to flash surface flooding like this one)
I'd already passed his provided information to Zen and warned that the "fix" would last about as long as it took for the next round of wet weather (which is the same warning he gave). They chose to brush that off and then pull this last boneheaded stunt
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On the bright side: I had a call and apoloigy from Denise at Zen's High Level Complaints. Amongst other comments it seems that:
- There were a number of "quite inappropriate comments" seen on the internal ticketing system
- my formal requests for DSO and Zen CEO complaint escalation were noted on a number of previous occasions but killed by the broadband fault group manager
- I'm not the only one who's raised such reuests which were not passed on
I get the impression that someone's been "shepherding" their fault rates to look good to senior management. Now they've noticed this could get "interesting"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
