Posted: 09th Jun, 2004 By: MarkJ
BT Wholesale has issued a response to the troubles being caused on some bonded ADSL products following its recent, yet limited, introduction of 'source filtering' on IPStream. It would appear as if they didn't know themselves:
The notification process for planned engineering works is well established and used to notify all our service provider customers.
All details relating to BT wholesale services and their functionality are notified to customers via a range of channels which again are well established.
As technology develops, service providers will develop new features and applications that can feasibly be used with the BT IPStream Service.
Often this can be done without involvement of or knowledge by BT Wholesale if it does not conflict with the current service or does not require BT Wholesale to make any changes to our service. If any such features or applications are created or introduced by the service provider, BT Wholesale will not be able to guarantee that such applications and features can be used without interference from any future changes that BT Wholesale feels are necessary to improve the Service.
The changes that BT made were (as A&A point out) to improve the security and integrity of the BT Network to the benefit of all our customers and this was communicated to them.
BT Wholesale always welcomes requests and suggestions from customers as to how services can be improved and we have a process for dealing with customer requests whereby a full appraisal is carried out before any decision is made.Sadly the response doesn't include any 'technical' opinion from BT regarding how they themselves feel about source filtering, although the wording would seem to suggest that it's favoured.
Much as
ADSLGuide suggests, it will now be up to BT to better communicate this change and hopefully find some resolution to the difficulties.