So, the never-ending story of the Broadband "Intermittent" fault continues.. It has now been over two years in my estimation that Sky and BT have been playing around with the problem that my broadband will work very nicely thank you for three to four weeks and then start being a bit silly.
We have worked through the options over the period of time. In the early days I was unsure about the wiring in my own house - after all it is an old building and the telephone cable that runs around the house may well have been put in by myself - and might have been repaired int he past with a pair of scissors and some sellotape.... As a result, when the signal starts to fail, I went through a little ritual... unplugging all the phones, and plugging the router into the "Test" socket where the BT line comes into the house. Then calling Sky and explaining that there was nothing in the house that could be affecting the problem...
A line test would prove that there is no problem "at the time" and then I would get a few weeks good service again. We put it down to "uncapping" the line... to pushing the line test through... to a build up of errors that is corrected by the line test... a "noise threshold" too low - allowing too many errors and so we went around in circles...
Finally a few weeks ago I got an Openreach engineer to the house.. He looked at the problem and re-wired the internal wiring of the house. I did not expect that. Int he past I had always been told that the internal wiring was my responsibility - but no.. he was happy to run a new dedicated "data Cable" around the house and by-pass my telephone set up entirely... I was happy with that - and the broadband worked ... for two weeks..
The next engineer was the one who looked at the data cable and agreed that it was fine - but did the Line test for the noise - and decided that if he capped the noise threshold at 6 or 7 instead of allowing it to go to 3 then - thought the speed would reduce it would still be well within the expected speed - (in my case 15 - 18 meg) and everything seemed to work - so I got service for a couple of weeks..
I even got a refund - they looked at the records and looked at when the service had been down over the period and offered me £67 in refunds - I accepted of course....
Then Bank Holiday Monday I found I had no service.. Indeed it was worse than it had been for a long time - with no service for hours at a time.... Calls to the call centre at Sky were becoming easier - because one of the questions that they ask is "has an engineer been to this problem in the last 14 days" and a "yes" answer puts you through to a completely different set of call handlers and you do not have to go through the whole "have you switched off and on again" routine...
Indeed, I hold onto the phone for over an hour as the handler reads all the notes.. and decides to that he needs to send an engineer - give the man a biscuit!
So today the engineers calls - for some reason Sky do not update the engineer with the information (remember it took almost an hour to read) when he calls... "tell me your problem" he says .. "My notes say "Intermittent fault" .... It is 8 am and I was not to bed early last night so a couple of cups of tea allow me to explain the history..
But lo and behold, for the first time ever, the broadband is actually off when he calls. I had not looked - I was still in bed.. but indeed there was no signal... He tests and says "you have a problem" and off he pops to check along the line...
So - apparently he checks the exchange and finds a problem down by the Kilkenny Cat - where my line comes out to my telegraph pole... So, he changed the cable that is in use and pops back and does some tests .. All seems to be working - so thank you Mark the engineer... Well until a few weeks when we will find if it is sorted or not.... Fingers crossed...
So... Ducks fed and watered and let out.. Chiuckens fed and watered and let out. Dog fed and watered. Broadband sorted (I hope) maybe I will go back for an hour ... Was up far too eraly this morning - though to be fair 'Thena has not ben waking me in the morning... at least she has not succeeded - I cannot be sure if she has tried or not...
So - I can do the blog and check my social media so all is well with the world..
Cheers!
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