BT line fault

[MaryAnne]

Sorry all, but we have a fault on our BT line. It's affecting our internet, badly. Spent a couple of hours on the phone to Talk Talk (India) on one phone and BT (India) on the other to discover this. DH has sorted me out a mobile Internet solution but it isn't up to much - took an hour to send an email with an image in it. The previous attempt had failed after 3 hours! The short story is that they won't assure me it will be fixed and sooner than 8th May (!)

So, I am really sorry to say that it may take a few days before I am fully available. As BT have already located the area of the fault (but not the specifics) I am foolishly optimistic that it will take less than the 7 days they warned me of Really sorry about this.

Mary Anne

[Nerlly]

Sorry to hear you're having problems, MaryAnne. I don't want to be a grumpy old woman, but I wish you the best of luck with BT. Last time I had a problem they were unable to diagnose it so I had to tell them what I thought was wrong, at which point they said they would send me a new filter 'urgently'. It took three weeks to turn up, but that was okay because they were talking rubbish anyway and the problem was something completely different. The time before that, when I needed a new hub, the engineer who turned up had a strop because I hadn't emptied and moved a heavy bookcase all by myself. He didn't offer to help, but went and had a sulk in the van while I moved it. And then he didn't need to access the area behind it anyway.

I hate BT.

But good luck anyway!

[MaryAnne]

Our internet is not from BT, thank goodness but it is Talk Talk which is possibly as bad. We had Bulldog, they were great, bought by Pipex, which was bad enough but when we moved to Talk Talk it was just rubbish. They just have no clue. The "help centre" in India has a script that they have to follow, stepping thru a whole load of steps ("Turn it off and on again" rubbish, and kept trying to get us to input dynamic Talk Talk IP address that has nothing to do with the static IP address we have, then dropped us from the call after an hour, and when we called back, wanted to begin again from the start - can you say Premium Rate line? Yeah.) to no avail. Because the voice phone line was fine, we didn't suspect that might be the problem and I really only called BT on a whim, since the router was telling us we had a good connection but it wouldn't even load web page.

Anyway, all long and boring, but DH has sorted me out with a temporary, albeit limited, solution via an Archos android tablet that has 3G sharing - my iPad is the first one with no internet connectivity.

BT did already text me to say they think they know where the fault is (sort of) so we shall see.

Looking now at Spitfire as a provider.

So I am HOPING I can at least pop on every day to check PMs and moderate users and Marketplace posts, but no promises

At this point I am totally fed up with the whole thing. Funny how when it works you sort of assume it always will .... until it doesn't. and then oh the stress!

[Gadget Monkey]

Hope you get some joy MaryAnne, we are with Talk Talk and last December our line suddenly dropped down to less than 0.5mb download speed and we couldn't get anything working, went through India, once you get through there you get a different country helpline which is more important, we went through all these several times and they acknowledged there was a fault. We were eventually given the head of Talk Talk in the UKs direct line where we could contact him. They called out BT, BT said it was Talk Talk, another 2 weeks with Talk Talk trying to sort it, then again they called BT who blamed Talk Talk, again they called BT who again checked all our line said it was at 4mb download and blamed Talk Talk, 2 hours after they left each time our download was again down to less than 0.5mb. Talk Talk again called out BT (that was once previously and then Monday mornings in a row, my neighbours must have thought I was having an affair with a BT man).... the 4th man came out, he was my neighbour, lived 4 doors up the road and just because it was him and he knew us he did everything he could to get this line working, even though he said it was Talk Talks fault. He called out the hoist so he could look up the pole, he went to about 3 different boxes, he replaced all our equipment at the exchange and it was still less than 0.5mb, eventually at about 3pm (he arrived at 8am in the morning), he decided to swap our line for the only spare line they had left. You know what? It worked. It was BTs fault all along and obviously we had been bad mouthing Talk Talk coz BT said it was there fault. We even had Talk Talk ringing us on a Saturday to see how our connection was..... so really although it seemed at the time that Talk Talk were cheap and awful, it turned out it was BTs fault all along. Also our phone line was crystal clear and we had no problems whatsoever with that.

[Chris55]

I've had Talk Talk for a long time, way back when it was Tiscali and have only had a problem once and that was found to be BT and put right very quickly.
Hope you get yours sorted quickly Mary Anne.

[jld]

Our BT line between school & Civic Centre went down on Wednesday afternoon - while we were half way through an OFSTED- still not been restored! No internet or schol portal- great as registers & everything on it!

[MaryAnne]

In never rains but it pours Both the Voip phone AND my mail server crashed in the last couple of days.

The BT line fault was down to some engineer working on something or another and neglecting to replace the cover, As it rained over the last few weeks, water poured in and corroded the connections. Actually, they say it could have been a couple of months that it was uncovered! Hence my agonisingly slow speeds. They fixed it, but didn't close the fault (cleared it, as in it was repaired, but didn't CLOSE it in their system so when Talk Talk tried to access our line they couldn't) Once we got that sorted (India again and it only took an hour to convince the guy on the line that he should manually close the fault rather than make us wait snother day for the system to so so automatically) then back to Talk Talk, who reset the Signal to Noise ratio. It didn't come back immediately, so spent another hour with them trying to tell me it was the router, prioritizing the VOIP phone traffic and wanting to send us a pre-configured router of their own to test before anything else. As the VOIP system is not actually running thru the router and in fact the VOIP system was not running at all because the power supply just died in the midst of all this, we were pretty sure that was nothing to do with it. It wasn't, as the internet popped buck on with the fastest connection we have had in ages this weekend!

Sorted the new power supply, VOIP phone working again, then the mail server in my parents basement in Virginia crashed (due to high winds, heavy rain, etc. there) No email for 2 days till our geeky mates in the States went over and connected to it from the front porch (the neighbours no longer call the police when they see some combination of scary, long haired men hanging out on my parent front porch with laptops ) and reset it.

So after a week of HELL I very cautiously say I think I am sorted. I'm sure there are loads of Marketplace posts to approve, and new users awaiting approval, and then I am going to try to do BlogBits and some other things that I have been unable to do. Thank you for your patience while I have been AWOL. With any luck we will now how some period of time with NO PROBLEMS - except, of course, Blogger issues I'm not sure they will ever be resolved. If you have a Blogger or Blogspot blog be aware that if you have Word Verification on, or if your blog is set to have the Comment Window open at the bottom of the comments page, there are 1000s of people who might comment but can't. Not just me, not just my set up, but anyone who is not logged in with Google. If you make the change so the comment box opens in a new window (and I'll have to find the link to how again, although I posted it before) it solves the problem for nearly everyone! It's simple and doesn't affect your blog at all. Just FYI

hope you all kept busy scrapping while I was otherwise occupied

[Chris55]

Great news Mary Anne, good to hear everything is up and running again.

[stillcrafting]

Flip me, they've put you through it lately. Fingers crossed there are no more problems, at least of this magnitude.

[Nana Pam]

Sorry to hear about your problems, I don't understand why people stay with comanies that give them a bad service unless they have too. We were with BT many years ago and it soon became obvious we needed to change. We went with Cable and Wireless, no problems, then it changed to NTL, no problems and now it is Virgin, no problems, obviously there are always teething troubles when companies merge but I understand that. Our telephones, our TV's (1 a huge HD one), and our computers, (1 a powerful gaming one) are all fed by cable via Virgin and we wouldn't change, obviously there are sometimes minor probs but are always sorted quickly
Nana Pam