This is driving me mad. Can anyone advise as to how to actually get BT
to do a test and give me the line attenuation information?

I've been pushed around from department to department and all I ever
get is "you can't have Broadband", presumably (the exchange is
enabled) based on the line length, which the fault reporting people at
151 tell me is 6km. This is on the limit, and I know people very close
to where I live who have passed the test with longer line lengths, so
I'd like someone to actually do the test and tell me the results. I
know you used to be able to get this from 17070, but not any more.

Presumably any ISP I go to will just rely on this black or white
information without instituting a test from BT themselves?

And another thing......

I have two lines in my house. The original one, which is the 6km line,
and another one, used only for voice/fax, which was installed about a
year ago. I don't know the exact details of how the connections work,
but it was run from the green junction box around the corner, as, I
assume, is my original line. But the fault line department tell me the
second line is 8km from the exchange.

Am I right that, if its possible to have that kind of discrepancy for
two lines running to the same house, its also possible to reconnect
the second line (or even have a replacement third line installed) so
that it may be *less* than 6km? Until I get some sort of response on
the attenuation I don't know whether this will make any difference,
since, if the line is noisy, the noise could be further down the line.

Any advice on what I can do next?

Thanks

Brian

"bigbrian" <bh8611@hotmail.com> wrote in message
newski0vvchrcaoscrli4sc8gck459uo79qbc@4ax.com...
Don't ask BT for the line test results.

Apply for ADSL via an ISP and if you fail ask them if they will contact BT
Wholesale and ask for the results for you. (some, mainly smaller ISP's are
more willing to do this for you)

As I am sure you know, line distance is really irrelevant, its line quality
that counts.

ISP's will place an order for you but it sounds like you will be rejected by
BT's automated ordering system based on the records they have for your line.

The way to get around this and actually have a test carried out (if you fail
the "normal way") is to ask your ISP to carry out a "manual order" - this
means it bypasses the 1st stage of BT's automated ordering system and they
will carry out a physical test. (again some ISP's are more willing to do
"manual orders")

If you have no luck, BT are looking at seeing if it is "technically viable"
to extend the the limits further - though don't expect much on this soon

Yes, its possible.

Your only other choice is if you are a borderline fail, see if BT will
accept a order for a new telephone line which you specify "must be suitable
for ADSL use".

If BT install it (their choice) and its not suitable for ADSL - they will
remove it and you won't have to pay the installation charge for a new line

Regards
Sunil

On Mon, 29 Dec 2003 15:51:03 +0000, bigbrian wrote:


Here's some idea of the gear that BT use:

http://www.tmcnet.com/bizwatch/news/091900e.htm

basically you spend 10 million dollars on Teradyne computerised digital signal
analysis equipment and point it at each line in turn. Line length itself
is of course merely indicative of likely signal quality not definitive,
10 million dollars buys you something more advanced than a tape measure.

Regards

Eric Lee

"bigbrian" <bh8611@hotmail.com> wrote in message
newski0vvchrcaoscrli4sc8gck459uo79qbc@4ax.com...
I`m in the same predicament as yourself (see 5.65km thread below), i spent
most of the day being ushered around BT`s "Help" lines only to be told by an
"Expert" from their Broadband dept. that it`s black or white and you have to
accept the answer when you enter your phone number. They tell me that`s what
they do too! I`ve been in contact with Zen who also not surprisingly said
`No`, so i`ve asked them for more details from BT re. my line
noise/capacitance etc as Sunil suggests. I would have let this one go except
one of their more helpful tecchie guys informed me that my line length was
5.65km, we all know the limit now goes to 6km. I would indeed be surprised
if my line exceeds 60db, my dial-up is always over 45k.
But what to do now?? Could i contact my small local exchange directly or
what, BT`s Help Lines don`t want to be bothered.
I mentioned a `new` line to our Expert as well, only to be told it probably
wouldn`t be any better than what i have...............
Hope you have better luck!

rgds,
Roy.

satscene wrote:
Roy your forgeting it's not just line loss, you have to factor in the signal
to noise ratio as well.

If you like talking to bricks & mortar (or timber depending on the
construction) then by all means talk to the local exchange, in other words
the likelyhood of anybody actually being there is limited & whether they can
actual be of any help is near to zero.

The only way you can get further is by getting an ISP to actually do a
manual order, you may be succesful but here again you may not. It's the
only way, wasting your time trying to chase it to ground by phoning up BT is
exactly that, a waste of time. In most cases you will not even be BT's
customer as you'll be the end user of an ISP who is BT's customer.

There are locations in this area whic are less than 1km from an exchange &
can't have any DSL service & others at a similar distance where you can only
get RADSL so you aren't alone.

I failed my line test at 3.75km from the exchange (hence using NTL) & I
personally have tested & passed lines which were 7km from the same exchange.
It's the way it the thing works out in reality even if it's not the way we
want them...

I personally have tested & passed lines which were 7km from the same
exchange.

how did the customer get you to do this, BT wont send me an engineer?

Decal

Decal wrote:
In the good old days, all premises were visited, but with people complaining
about the cost of the visit (hence the higher install price) this has been
stopped for most residential installs as the end users don't won't to spend
the cash...

"Kráftéé" <kraftee@nospam.ntlworld.com> "In the good old days, all premises
were visited, but with people complaining about the cost of the visit (hence
the higher install price) this has been stopped for most residential
installs as the end users don't won't to spend the cash..."

So so true. the avaerage engineer visit cost being around £80
statistically - thats £80 lost for every fail OR a revenue return of a few
£££ a month from an isp. Thats just not good business sense - but
frustrating for many customers.

I'm sure all BT staff could think of particular instances of stupidity
locally to them. In my 'patch' we have a wonderful new development
"Beggarwood" off of Dummer Exchange in Hampshire. What is ironic is all the
little farmhouses fall within reach of adsl but this new estate of several
thosand houses does not. BT Planning stupidity on this one. Cable run 7km
and just out of limit. The stupidity - the feed runs past all the houses it
feeds for 1km to the cab, then back 1km to the homes. More suitable
positioning of the cab would have meant 90% of the estate would have got
ADSL but as it is 10% do.

Corking.

In article <LaoIb.6942$tQ6.74687@wards.force9.net>, rabbit@droppings.com
(Michael Jackson) wrote:

Not quite true - the first tranche are within reach, but from Canberra
onwards - not a prayer by line length!

The even more ludicrous thing - on actual line *loss* the whole estate
is coverable, since the actual cable is in good nick. But will BT bend
the rules to get the customers? Nope!

I have ADSL here in Bronze but then my line length is 5.9km.

--
Paul Cummins - Always a NetHead
Wasting bandwidth since 1981

begin Once upon a time there was a badly broken newsreader...

In article <da6a634c9edf5ce468ce92665fc4c8ae@news.teranews.co m>,
paul@cummins.ie.eu.org (Paul Cummins) wrote:


X-Newsreader: Ameol 2 version 2.53.2014 - http://www.ameol.com/

So there was !


- Steve

"Paul Cummins" <paul@cummins.ie.eu.org> wrote in message

"The even more ludicrous thing - on actual line *loss* the whole estate is
coverable, since the actual cable is in good nick"

No it's not. The E side feed to the cab(7) is shot to pieces. This is
located next to 84. The average db loss just over 61 db but the signal to
noise ratio out of limits. What is now starting to happen along that belt is
we are seeing adsl faults - loss of service etc and customer adsl accounts
are now getting terminated because of this. Personally I find this
disgusting but it seems the great BT machine can do this.

In other parts of the town where we have had such issues we have been able
to chnage out e sides (cable to the cab from exchange) onto different
physical cables to recuse the loss and improve the snr. Cab 7 is an
exception as it has just the one cable to it.

The farce of it all is the position of cab 7. It needed to be located
halfway down between arcadia and ryecroft. There would have been no issue
then. The first set of houses it feeds are in Arcadia. You could eat
alphabet spagetti and shit out better planning than what we ended up with.

In passing on your street I take it amoungst those nice houses you have an
element of scum. Some smack head up there allowed their one year old to
swallow a pile of tamazapan tablets the over night. They arrested the lot of
them because nobody was either sober or undrugged enough to look after the
kid properly. You may have seen the action and in case you were wondering -
now you know.

Michael Jackson <rabbit@droppings.com> wrote:
I'm wondering about what happens if I report a fault on my ADSL line,
and you seem like you might have a clue

My router drops out typically a few minutes in the morning sometime every
day.
Apart from this the service is acceptable.
I'm right on the ragged edge of attenuation, when converting from HH, my
line "whooshed" at 60.5db. (IIRC)
May a fault report result in BT simply disconnecting the ADSL if they
can't rectify it?
(I'm more or less happy with this level of service, as the longest it's
been out is 5 min or so, and I can always dialup.)

The router is reporting from 55-63db attenuation at various times.

"Ian Stirling" <root@mauve.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:qWbJb.7858"My
router drops out typically a few minutes in the morning sometime every
day."

It would not surprise me if it were claimed to be distance/loss/snr - not
because it were necessarily true - but because it's the easy way out.

On Mr C's estate I have been party to 6 early adsl terminations. One guy
kicking and screaming and locking the engineer in his house(he did not take
it well) The only reason they were supplied in the first place was down to
the stupidity of the droid to decipher the entire test results correctly.
Normally having a dacs on your line is a big fat no no, but, when the droid
tests it it reports the line length as 1.04km - you work out what went wrong
here (and still does).

Its a real sticky wicket as (A)DSL is classes as a 'product' and not a
'service'. Be sure it's not the isp or router refreshing the session! The
way I would approach it is to report the line as 'noisy' and tell the droid
it's intermittent. If it has any underlying nasties on it bringing down the
quality this should catch it.

Brian Morrison <scrapspam@fenrir.org.uk> wrote:
No.
The odometer on the engineers van read 4 miles, so somewhere over 6.5Km.

I've had problems with HH on the line in the past, I suspect it's the
same fault that has not been fixed despite several straight days of the
line being worked on.

Perhaps, I'm unsure if the router is accurate.

Michael Jackson <itouch@littlepeople.com> wrote:
It's not, I'm logging the link stats every second, and the modem is actually
losing sync, trying to retrain, and not managing, and repeating.

Part of the problem is that there has been a long history of faults on
this line, for example the analog ports kept dropping out on HH, which
led to many, many visits, and allegedly nearly all the joints checked,
so anything easy to fix has probably been found.
Thanks.

Brian Morrison <scrapspam@fenrir.org.uk> wrote:
I suspect so.
My next thing to try is to see if there is any noise at all on the phone when
the ADSL connection is failing.

I thought that 8db was a rather large variation.

One thing that struck me as odd - there was no attempt to do any TDR on the
line (that I saw), I would have thought that would be the first step in
locating a fault...

Thanks.

"Ian Stirling" <root@mauve.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
"One thing that struck me as odd - there was no attempt to do any TDR on the
line (that I saw), I would have thought that would be the first step in
locating a fault..."

Not really so. The best faulting at BT comes from local knowledge with the
best faultsmen being the Underground Network variety. The problem is that
(a)dsl is considered to be 'eliete' and there are dedicated (a)dsl
engineers - who are trained to do very little. It's poles apart.

In most parts of my patch I will know or have a very good idea of where a
fault is just from the customers address without the need for banging a mole
on a line
but would use it to confirm my fealings.

What I would say with Ian's problem is that a line fault probably exists
and it's just never made it as far as an interested engineer. Thats my
personal and honest view. This could be because the cable run is partially
aluminum, mostly jointed in the carriageway on an unpleasant road or other
'lazy and idol' factors. However it is more likely that a large length of
the cable feeding you needs replacing (or cabinet even) and regardless of
the BT 'We keep our promises' bullshit it comes down to cost.

(A)dsl is pretty resiliant on noisy lines but you tend to get the loss of
sync that you describe. In such cases HH/BH tends to completely row out. To
check for noise when this is happening just pick up the phone and dial 1470
17070 option 2 (quiet line test) and listen to it for 10 minutes or so - if
you can hear it slowly build up crackling BINGO! Other faults manifest in
different ways and effect (a)dsl, speach and isdn differently - see if any
of these scenarios are familiar:

Earth Contact - Huming simular to you putting your finger on the input of an
audio amplifier through to no dial tone and loss of service
(speach/dsl/isdn)
Battery Contact - Occasional cracking and poping/frying noises with
overhearing of other lines and the howler. (A)DSL coming and going, ISDN
falls over.
Loop - Loss of incoming calls, often unexplainably engaged, phone rings
momentarily and drops out no dial tone. (a)dsl and ISDN fall over
Dis - No dial tone not working (cut off) (a)dsl and ISDN fall over
HR Dis - Crackling on line that builds up to massive amounts of near white
noise - impossible to hear speach (a)dsl loses sync, ISDN falls over/drops
out

"Brian Morrison" <scrapspam@fenrir.org.uk> wrote in message
newsan.2004.01.03.12.56.21.604750@fenrir.org.uk. ..
"I imagine the usual problem exists in BT as regards technical stuff. Good
people with dedication are encouraged to move up the management structure"

Sadly not. The phrase that holds water at BT is "S**t floats to the surface"

Good men with dedication to solve problems for customers are told "Hey, your
statistics look crap you are not doing enough work"

Example from yesterday (and Im sure any BT bod who gives a damn about the
end user - and there are still a few of us) will be able to count numerous
scenarios like this:>

Notes on job simular to:
'Customer reporting cut off and noisy line. The nexy door neigbour had this
fault and since fixed this customer appears to have inhereted it'

First engineer had swapped the two copper pairs in just a few minutes. I
spent 4 hours fixing the actual fault. BT rewards him with a bonus for
productivity, I get a written warning for not doing 'enough'.

Sadly the BT machine does not understand things at a basic level, rewards
those that generate good statistics (regardless of the havoc they unleash),
whilst penalising those trying to permanantly solve customer problems
properly and keep the network in good order.

Is it any wonder why anyone who has to deal with BT in any capacity comes
close to suicide???

I could write a book on the crazy inside workings of BT but until PROPER
competition exists in all areas there will never be a cat in hells chance of
any real change. The new logo may look nice but it's the same old filith
behind the neon.......

Michael Jackson <itouch@littlepeople.com> wrote:
<snipped a very interesting post>

You dont by any chance live in Buckinghamshire do you? Would be interested
in engaging you on a personal consulatncy basis to investigate problems that
BT are being a wet rag over. In fact I am sure that there is the basis for
an entire weekend and holidays consultancy career helping people who have
ADSL problems. Given that BT a significant part of the problem, if we
confronted them with actual hard evidence they might do something about
improving the line.

S. Althaf