Back in the days of yore, I had a Freeserve DSL line at my parents house as options were limited, and we simply upgraded from the old dialup service. As the years went by, the service changed hands so we now get a monthly charge from Orange for the charming sum of £19.99 for a 1mbit line.
My mum needs stability over speed, and as the service didn't cause a problem we've never gone through the rigmarole of changing over to another ISP, afterall we'd never received ANY paperwork from Orange at any point and it sounded like unnecessary hassle.
Cue yesterday afternoon, and the line drops. I go to her house, check everything via common sense (tried an old Speedtouch modem to rule out the Netgear router (which is wired anyway), plugged into the main socket rather than extensions etc etc) but there's just absolutely nothing on the line. Diagnostics show the LCP is down error, then tries to bring it up and just refreshes into infinity. No 'green tick' on the router at all.
Naturally, we've now got to deal with the customer service jugganauts of BT and Orange, both of whom predictably tried to fob us off. I managed to get my account details for Orange (which hilariously lists us as having a free wireless router with them on an 8mbit line, complete nonsense) and after giving Alex at their CS first line desk my lifes history for the security checks, silence for a few minutes as he checks the line then tells me 'there is a local outage'. Trying to get any more detail than this just seemed to throw him into a bit of a panic, as I gleefully explained I have access to the internet from multiple places, so a link where I could monitor progress of this 'outage' would be gratefully appreciated. I have no idea what his final response was, but it involved emails and blinking lights. I'll review the call from my recording (I call CS lines from the workplace for very good reason!) but it's essentially (combined with a similar, nondescrit response from BT) told us : there's a problem. there's no ETA. we might do something about it. we might not.
I'm not surprised, but as I'm sure everyone on this forum is already aware... incredibly frustrating. My father disabled to the point where he needs 24/7 care so my mother cannot leave the property, and due to the rural area and cost anything above a bog standard DSL isn't feasible for a line she absolutely depends on. The idea of waiting more than 'a day or two' for someone to do anything (especially before a weekend) is not great, but the possibility that nobody will ever do anything is what's worrying me the most.
Has anyone in a similar position got a piece of advise for fast tracking this, or at least getting some info? Who should be my primary source of contact, BT are usually adamant that despite the line being theres, as we don't have a DSL contract with them it's not their responsibility. They used this line of defense when one of their workers completely buggered the line up before and I had to spend the evening wrapped up in cables and filters putting it back together again).
Mobile signal is next to zero in the place too, so a 3G dongle is alas next to useless. After this, I think I'll be jumping ship to someone else, but right now priority is on getting connection restored. Thanks!
Cheers for that link, I armed myself with the knowledge and spoke to them a few more times.
Their response changed from
"The work is being done by BT. There is no ETA."
"The work is being done by Enertia for BT. There is no ETA."
"The work is being done by us. It'll be back up at 10pm."
Naturally, at 10pm nothing had changed nor had it by 10am the next morning. Then the proudly stamped SURGEMASTER 4 way gang cable literally exploded (bits flew out) but luckily the PC wasn't on and survived. The router didn't, and given all the weird coincidences around the line I thought it best to buy a new router. (Argos then sold me a second hand one without my knowledge, but that's another story).
Eventually after speaking to CS to get the right settings, which took forever as he kept changing what the username should be, connectivity was restored at the stonking 1mbit. Success... I guess! Still no idea what the actual cause of the problem was, but relieved she's back online.
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