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FTTC dropping: four Openreach engineers and no closer to resolving the issue

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Openreach's latest solution is to re-route our connection via another DP and so make the line 200m longer. This is an effort to stablise it.

Erh, nope.
 
So they think the issue is the physical cable, and they've run out of pairs along that route and so rather than lay a new pair, or god forbid, fibre while they're about it - that would be far too modern - they prefer to re-route an existing pair.

If it's the cable e.g. it has micro-fractures, this doesn't explain why there weren't any drops with ADSL though, does it, unless they came along at the same time as the VDSL upgrade. I still wonder if it's something like a faulty tie-pair, if that's what it's called, between the two cabinets.
 
The guy I spoke to yesterday from Openreach hasn't even seen the cable, he just decided this over the phone as "there's nothing else we can do for you".

Re-routing the cable isn't going to solve the problem unless the problem is at our specific DP which it isn't because the last good engineer checked that pole and all was good.

After this 200m length, the cable goes to the same cable as the current one does, so I don't see how in any way this going to solve the problem at all.

The connection is definitely worse when it is raining and for some time after it has rained. This leads me to believe that there could be water ingress at one of many overhead joints a long the line. It's even possible that the part of the line that is underground (the last 300m or so) could have water ingress.

But have Openreach checked these joints or the condition of the physical line at all? Of course not.
 
A collection of overhead joints serving a cluster of houses I pass on my runs were hanging upside down merely attached by the cables. Credit to Openreach, once I reported it, they did get returned to correct orientation...by means of a cable tie. Did the engineer check inside to see if there was any water damage though, that is the question?
 
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There's no competition, so they can be a joke of a company - they don't need to improve :(

It does seem odd that they are communicating directly, the ISP should really be handling this and fighting the customer's corner.

If the line is rerouted and made 200m longer it will probably still perform within the estimate range i.e. be above the "B range" estimate, which Openreach would probably consider to be satisfactory. It would be better to have a slower connection that is stable than one which regularly drops out.

It seems odd that they're suggesting this, it does rather imply that they believe that the line is to blame as it seems like a fair amount of work with no guarantee of success. Though we cannot be 100% certain of exactly what they have done so far and what the various engineers' notes say.

Even if they do the work and the line is then not dropping out, but is slow, you could cancel, but with no alternate choice of infrastructure that doesn't really help.

And anyway most users would not know how VDSL works nor should they need to. They would just want it fixed: so you could put pressure on the ISP - it might be time to subtly suggest legal action along the lines of "the service has not been provided with due skill and care".

You could try moving over to AAISP on a business contract as they seem to be good at kicking Openreach's backside and do appear to achieve demonstrably good outcomes. Though from what I recall they are not signatories to the OFCOM Code of Practice re: speeds, so caution might be advised, it appears they hold you to a full contract even if the speeds turn out to be much poorer than the estimate.

And another thing to watch is the now current estimate which in theory should reflect what you get now, not what was estimated in the first place.
 
But re-routing it to make it longer isn't going to make the connection better, it's going to make it worse!

The further you are away from the cabinet, the worse the connection, not the better.

Relatively, the line will perform exactly the same and it will still be dropping out because the fault like I say, isn't at that DP. That's all they're avoiding.

It makes no sense at all.

TalkTalk are fighting my corner but I am emailing Openreach's CEO team too to try and get something done. Very little it seems like.
 
For the sake of clarity:

1. Cabinet > DP (may be more than one possible route e.g. when new houses were built they were tacked on in a roundabout fashion)

2. DP > Home (= dropwire? presumably only one possible route though there may be more than one DP in a short distance)

What's puzzling me is which bit they want to swap out. Is it (1) hence would be the same DP, taking a (200m) longer route to that DP, avoiding an earlier section that may be suspect but via the same DP?

If they're talking about (2) then I'm not seeing quite how that can be done without putting another pole up, though I don't know the wiring route intimately enough to judge.

If it's both then that would seem to eradicate any fault along the entire loop length.

Ironically, if they re-routed the line here in similar fashion and ran it across the top of the main village route from one side of the road to the other, rather than going down one side and back up the other side as I suspect that it does, a fair distance (450m?) would be shaved off, meaning it might be fast enough for us to consider ordering it.

I know that they have equipment which can test a line and detect where a fault lies, but when the fault is intermittent it isn't going to catch that. You'd think they could clip the equipment to the line in various segments and leave it for a day or two, then come back and look at the diagnostics, doing this in sections until they find the failing one.
 
Although you shouldn't have to do the detective work yourself and tell them where the fault lies, you could put a small piece in the next village magazine asking anyone who has VDSL and is experiencing drop outs to contact you, to see if the problem is more widespread indicating it's likely to be at or close to the cabinet, or actually related to the fibre E-side itself.
 
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So they've done another pair change and our sync speed is now 25Mbps. It was 50Mbps before...

They say they now have to wait 10 days before they can change the whole aerial cable out between the pole and where the cable goes underground (by the pond). That will give everyone on that cable a new pair in that part of the cable.

As you can probably guess I'm not best pleased as we've lost half of our speed in minutes!
 
I know that they have equipment which can test a line and detect where a fault lies, but when the fault is intermittent it isn't going to catch that. You'd think they could clip the equipment to the line in various segments and leave it for a day or two, then come back and look at the diagnostics, doing this in sections until they find the failing one.

If we are talking micro-fractures, not only have they got machines that can detect them; it can also count them and say how far along the line they are; although if your line is like mine, there were so many fractures, they couldnt actually count them all (gave up and guestimated over 1,000).

Also, it can "see" the fractures even when the line is behaving, each break causes an "echo" as part of the signal is reflected.
 
So they've done another pair change and our sync speed is now 25Mbps. It was 50Mbps before...

They say they now have to wait 10 days before they can change the whole aerial cable out between the pole and where the cable goes underground (by the pond). That will give everyone on that cable a new pair in that part of the cable.

As you can probably guess I'm not best pleased as we've lost half of our speed in minutes!

I suspect it would be worth communicating the new fault (low speed) to the ISP now.

As, otherwise, if it remains stable, I guess they're not going to do any more and Openreach will report "fault solved" to them.
 
A bit of comfort is that TalkTalk aren't accepting 25Mb even if the line is stable.

Still extremely confused why if my old pair was perfect, why they changed it for a worse pair without comparing the two.

The engineer acknowledged the much lower speed and I feel that because they're going to change the aerial cable anyway, he couldn't be bothered to put us back on our previous pair. Still unnaceptable.
 
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I haven't driven down near the pond - the bit you mention - however it does look like they're replacing some or all of the UG cable that routes this way too judging by the dig and road works just near us and possibly connected with the six, I think, visits (that I've noticed) to someone on this lane. I wonder of they will indeed short-cut the circuit to take a direct route up our lane instead of going away and then back again. That would make the cable length a fair bit shorter.
 
After nine visits, the issue remains unresolved, so more emails have been sent to Joe Garner (Openreach CEO), a long with Sir Michael Rake (BT Chairman) and Gavin Patterson (BT CEO).

The engineers keep saying the line is pefect, is fault-free, blah, blah, blah and yet, it is still erroring (CRCs they say indicate a line fault, well we've had 135 in the last 24 hours) and still dropping. We have still not had uptime longer than 4 days.

At least our speed has been restored after one engineer changed our pair for a worse one despite calling our original pair "perfect" (thanks Garry).

I will be emailing Mark (of this website) again, to see if we can get a news item running as we're completely fed up now.
 
Will be interesting to find out what the fault actually was.

It does look as though they're taking these faults seriously, though far too late, to have started digging.

I guess that there were never exactly stacks of free pairs in the first place and so many have been condemned as defective now that they're having to swap sections out.

That one pair can be twice as fast as another gives an indication of just how poor some of the pairs are.

If the line has been changed, the drop wire replaced and the line moved to another cabinet port, and it's still happening that surely narrows down where the issue must lie. You'd have thought :)
 
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