The Great Broadband Outage of 2023
Jun. 28th, 2023 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiIn mid-May, mid-morning, we were both on Teams calls, and then... everything stopped. It wasn't particularly clear what had stopped: some lights on the router were on, but not the Internet light. As it was just about lunch time, we left it alone in the hope that something out there had crashed and would restart itself.
But no. So we called our ISP, PlusNet. At some point of plugging in and unplugging, I also found we lost the dial tone on the phone line, so we also called BT. From this two things emerged: I could not find any route in the BT IVR that led to the ability to speak to a human being; and PlusNet preferred to deal with the fault by text - they were clearly using the same basic system as BT with a little rewording. However, at least PlusNet could be brought to answer the phone. A fault was diagnosed, an OpenReach engineer was booked.
Or so we thought. The OpenReach engineer didn't show. However an OpenReach engineer did turn up at the house next door, where he apparently disrupted the broadband which had been working fine. He just looked awkward stuck between myself and the neighbour as, for different reasons, neither of us were particularly happy. It turned out that PlusNet had "requested" an engineer but our appointment hadn't been confirmed. The same thing happened a second time the following day. Finally, an engineer did visit, but didn't do anything particularly helpful. Our line was fine, he said. As we had our own router, he would go no further. I understand that perspective to some extent, but it was useless in terms of resolving our problem.
PlusNet then agreed to send a router. This was delivered by Royal Mail to the wrong house on the street. Fortunately the people down the street noticed the mistake and came round in the evening to drop it off. To no-one's surprise, this router showed exactly the same symptoms: a working DSL line but no broadband connection.
More calls to PlusNet; more difficulty booking an OpenReach engineer visit. Finally, OpenReach offered a Saturday appointment after rejecting one a couple of days later. The engineer came, tested the line and found it was working very well: finally, after some hours and apparently tricky calls to back-office support, it was diagnosed that an "exchange upgrade" had left a system misconfigured with our port number, resulting in no connection. Once that was addressed, everything was working. It took three weeks to get to this point.
However, the line seemed to cut out most days, as if something was rebooting. After about 10 days, it finally stopped working altogether again. Yet again, PlusNet diagnosed a fault and dispatched an OpenReach engineer - this time just to the exchange, although they did come to visit the property. This time the port at the exchange was faulty - attributed to thunder storms a few days earlier.
It is fair to say tempers were frayed at various points during all of this. Working from home is now our regular mode, with occasional trips to the office. Costs mount up significantly if you're travelling in to London at peak times - and if you know you will be doing this several times, it saves money to buy a season ticket, compared to buying day by day. Phone tethering is all very well but it's quite limited if you need to do something data-intensive.
Although PlusNet were always pleasant to speak to, they were frequently not effective. The integration with OpenReach seemed to be abysmal. That's one part of BT talking to another. Unfortunately, like many parts of the country, we have no choice about the OpenReach end of that arrangement.
I began researching alternatives. Apparently it's unusual to have different landline telephone and broadband providers these days. Sampling my current colleagues it's unusual to have a landline telephone at all. To be honest, neither of us particularly embrace the telephone, in landline or mobile format. Then I found out that the PSTN is due to be turned off in 2025, replaced entirely with VoIP.
GigaClear are digging up streets tantalisingly close to us, but not quite here yet. The plain old not-super-fast broadband has been quite satisfactory up until now; we don't need crazy fibre speeds but we do want reliability.
For the time being, we are staying put through a combination of nervousness about further difficulties and inertia, but I think we are ready to move if there's any more disruption. If we stay on the copper line, it looks like we have to have fibre-to-the-cabinet (which ISPs seem to be mendaciously marketing as "fibre" packages) anyway for a new service; at the moment Zen Internet are my preference if we switch in that direction. On the other hand, if GigaClear show up here, we could have fibre-to-the-premises (aka "full fibre"). For reasons I can't fathom, other than BT price-gouging, either of these might be slightly cheaper than what we currently have. Its all a bit baffling.
But no. So we called our ISP, PlusNet. At some point of plugging in and unplugging, I also found we lost the dial tone on the phone line, so we also called BT. From this two things emerged: I could not find any route in the BT IVR that led to the ability to speak to a human being; and PlusNet preferred to deal with the fault by text - they were clearly using the same basic system as BT with a little rewording. However, at least PlusNet could be brought to answer the phone. A fault was diagnosed, an OpenReach engineer was booked.
Or so we thought. The OpenReach engineer didn't show. However an OpenReach engineer did turn up at the house next door, where he apparently disrupted the broadband which had been working fine. He just looked awkward stuck between myself and the neighbour as, for different reasons, neither of us were particularly happy. It turned out that PlusNet had "requested" an engineer but our appointment hadn't been confirmed. The same thing happened a second time the following day. Finally, an engineer did visit, but didn't do anything particularly helpful. Our line was fine, he said. As we had our own router, he would go no further. I understand that perspective to some extent, but it was useless in terms of resolving our problem.
PlusNet then agreed to send a router. This was delivered by Royal Mail to the wrong house on the street. Fortunately the people down the street noticed the mistake and came round in the evening to drop it off. To no-one's surprise, this router showed exactly the same symptoms: a working DSL line but no broadband connection.
More calls to PlusNet; more difficulty booking an OpenReach engineer visit. Finally, OpenReach offered a Saturday appointment after rejecting one a couple of days later. The engineer came, tested the line and found it was working very well: finally, after some hours and apparently tricky calls to back-office support, it was diagnosed that an "exchange upgrade" had left a system misconfigured with our port number, resulting in no connection. Once that was addressed, everything was working. It took three weeks to get to this point.
However, the line seemed to cut out most days, as if something was rebooting. After about 10 days, it finally stopped working altogether again. Yet again, PlusNet diagnosed a fault and dispatched an OpenReach engineer - this time just to the exchange, although they did come to visit the property. This time the port at the exchange was faulty - attributed to thunder storms a few days earlier.
It is fair to say tempers were frayed at various points during all of this. Working from home is now our regular mode, with occasional trips to the office. Costs mount up significantly if you're travelling in to London at peak times - and if you know you will be doing this several times, it saves money to buy a season ticket, compared to buying day by day. Phone tethering is all very well but it's quite limited if you need to do something data-intensive.
Although PlusNet were always pleasant to speak to, they were frequently not effective. The integration with OpenReach seemed to be abysmal. That's one part of BT talking to another. Unfortunately, like many parts of the country, we have no choice about the OpenReach end of that arrangement.
I began researching alternatives. Apparently it's unusual to have different landline telephone and broadband providers these days. Sampling my current colleagues it's unusual to have a landline telephone at all. To be honest, neither of us particularly embrace the telephone, in landline or mobile format. Then I found out that the PSTN is due to be turned off in 2025, replaced entirely with VoIP.
GigaClear are digging up streets tantalisingly close to us, but not quite here yet. The plain old not-super-fast broadband has been quite satisfactory up until now; we don't need crazy fibre speeds but we do want reliability.
For the time being, we are staying put through a combination of nervousness about further difficulties and inertia, but I think we are ready to move if there's any more disruption. If we stay on the copper line, it looks like we have to have fibre-to-the-cabinet (which ISPs seem to be mendaciously marketing as "fibre" packages) anyway for a new service; at the moment Zen Internet are my preference if we switch in that direction. On the other hand, if GigaClear show up here, we could have fibre-to-the-premises (aka "full fibre"). For reasons I can't fathom, other than BT price-gouging, either of these might be slightly cheaper than what we currently have. Its all a bit baffling.