High-speed internet links are something that makes FOSS development much easier, but I’m still having reliability problems with my ADSL. A fringe benefit of moving to a more open Linux-based router is that I can see what’s going wrong in more detail. But now I have to gamble nearly two hundred pounds in order to get the service providers to continue trying to find the bug! Sorry for the length, but let me explain how bad broadband in rural England is just now…
Outside the big cities with their cable networks, Company A owns the lines, Company B provides the services and we buy those services from reseller Company C. Sometimes the same company is A and B or B and C, but never all three. Most of the companies who are B won’t be C themselves - in other words, they don’t sell retail, but they nearly always seem to have a main or preferred retail partner.
Company A is nearly always OpenReach, part of BT Group, the telephone monopoly privatised back in the 1980s but still somehow keeping its landline monopoly. Why is that allowed?
Company C has been The Phone Co-op for me for the last few years. Back in February, I changed how I bought my services, combining phone and broadband into one purchase. They’d been two purchases mainly because I switched my ADSL from Pipex to the co-op at a different time to switching my line to them. As I understand it, this change had the side effect of changing Company B from OpenReach to Opal Telecom. Opal are the provider business behind TalkTalk, hardest to use Broadband ISP 2009.
Since the change, I’ve been suffering unexplained disconnections, especially in the early evenings and at weekends. I’m pretty sure it’s Opal’s equipment to blame for two reasons:-
Firstly, this wasn’t happening until Opal became Company B, while Companies A and C are the same as before (when I had a stable but unspectacular 4Mbps connection).
Secondly, since changing my router, I can see LCP TermReq being sent by Opal’s PPP peers. Opal insist their equipment isn’t sending TermReq messages. My Netgear router disagrees, but I can’t seem to get anyone to take its pppd debug logs seriously.
So, I’ve complained to my supplier (Company C), they’ve pretty straightforwardly passed it to Company B and I’ve jumped through all the bloody silly hoops like using only wired connections to the router (yay, wires across the house), plugging the router into different phone sockets (yay, more wires across the house) and disconnecting everything from the phone sockets so Company A can run some voltage test (yay, uncontactability - just as well other software.coop workers can cover for me).
Now the next step is for some phone engineer to call. For this to happen, I have to agree that I will pay GBP 164 if a fault is found on my phone network instead of theirs. If I don’t, they will give up trying to find the fault.
I don’t really see why this is necessary: surely if there was a line fault, it would have shown itself on the old service? Also, the router says the line has no fault and the SNR and Attenuation are both fine but not great. Unlike most people, I’ve already had my house phone network tested with professional equipment (yay for network engineers in the co-op trying to avoid the painful state of British broadband bugfixing), but I’m still left betting hundreds of pounds on the phone engineers not pointing the finger at my network. What choice do I have?
I’ve read elsewhere about people giving up on ADSL and switching to mobile internet because then they have only one company to deal with. I can see some attraction in that, but I live in a village with poor mobile service and I suspect the forthcoming T-Mobile/Orange and T-Mobile/Three link-ups will soon make that less straightforward too. A confusopoly is probably more profitable to telephone companies.
Do most people bet a couple of hundred pounds to get their broadband fixed? How many broadband faults get ignored at that point? Why don’t the retail company Cs have access to enough Company B systems to lead the fault-finding instead of only being able to pass it on to people who seem to give replies that contradict the logs and won’t talk directly to customers? Is fixing this A-B-C three-companies-pass-the-buck system a necessity for Digital Britain? Why isn’t the government intervening to end the OpenReach monopoly outside the big cities?
Tags: adsl, broadband, digital britain, netgear, opal, opaltelecom, openreach, router, the phone co-op
When will Britain catch up and start offering fiber?
In the cities it is more or less a duopoly - the cable company and BT Openreach. I don’t think cable customers are much better off, though I doubt they ever risk an extra 164 pounds.
If someone could get a license to hang cables from the telegraph poles, someone could easily set up an inexpensive digital TV and broadband co-op for rural areas. But the cable TV company doesn’t show up in villages, because they seem to have to dig up the streets and verges (costly.)
Ultimately, the chances are that LLU hasn’t come to your (or mine for that matter) exchange because no-one has expressed any interest in operating there. However hard the Government pushes to enable LLU in every exchange (which I believe is likely to happen anyway by late 2012, as the 21CN rollout culminates), this isn’t going to entice AOL or O2 or whoever to actually provide a service at them. In the meantime in the absence, Ofcom at least continues to heavily regulate BT Wholesale in these rural exchanges.
I’m currently in the same situation, the connection drops now and then and the ISP want’s to pin the bill on me if I want the engineer to come over.
What I’ve read from around the net is that the engineer quality is quite random, you might get a good one who gets the job done quickly or someone who just goes: “Have you tried turning it on off? ohh look, no fault here, gimme money.”
The £165+VAT is just ridiculous in my opinion, so I am most likely just going to wait until I get out of the contract and switch to some other alternative (cable).
It sucks, doesn’t it. Depending on how much you can bear to read, David Woodhouse’s blog usually reads a similar tale of woe: http://www.advogato.org/person/dwmw2/
BT essentially need to be destroyed, utterly. After a painful experience a few years ago trying to get their landline (the only service I want from them and unfortunately one I require for the stuff to sit on top), I’ve made it a personal long-term goal to see to their demise.
Wow, thanks for all the replies! Fibre to the home? Hahahah - I’d settle for working connections on the copper!
@David - a license to hang cables from the telegraph poles? Is that possible? If so, it could explain why BT is replacing telegraph poles with underground cables here.
@Adam - this is an LLU line (I’m connected to the nearby town’s main exchange) but OpenReach are still responsible for the copper from the exchange to the house as far as I can tell.
@Mart - please, make a formal complaint about the fee and push it all the way. You might even escape the contract minimum term.
@Jon - thanks for the link. I already knew I’m not alone, but I didn’t realise how many people were with me. I share your views on BT since the dishonest marketing that made me stop buying directly from them a few years ago.
“when I had a stable but unspectacular 4Mbps connection”
In my city (capital of the country) 4Mbps IS spectacular.
In rural areas, 0.5Mbps is spectacular.
And the service is normally unstable. There is kinda monopoly, with each city (except big ones, of course) being ruled by only one telco company each.
Look down, bro. You’re very lucky.
I’ve done a bunch of research on rural broadband access here in the States and have found that there are some very cool new options evolving through wireless.
Here’s a couple of examples of ones I’ve found:
* http://www.communitywisp.com/coverage.html - this isn’t too rural of an area, so its more of a backup / redundancy
* http://www.webjogger.net/services/highspeed/availability.htm - this area is very rural and the fact that this service is available there is very appealing to me
I don’t use either of these providers though - I use mobile internet, fiber, and cable to access the net.
As far as reliability goes, my experience with DSL has been so poor that I will honestly move somewhere else instead of use it.
What are the laws in the UK like for municipal networks? In many areas where I live in the northeast, many electricity providers are owned and operated by small local municipalities. They started laying fiber to better read meters, then realized they could use them for networking too. Some got setup before the lobbyists successfully outlawed it in many areas - Grrrr! The Taunton Municipal Lighting Plant is a great example:
http://www.tmlp.com/fiber_access.html
@fulanoDeTal - connection speed was 4Mbps, but data transfer rate was usually lower and I’m at the edge of the parish nearest the neighbouring town (and its telephone exchange) - the other edge doesn’t even get 0.5Mbps, as I understand it. Other places have worse connections, but my point is that the UK broadband is a mess, monopolies are still involved and it’s often far worse than the headline figures.
@Albert - I’ve no idea on the laws. The municipal-linked networks I’ve seen have been wifi, involved private companies and they’ve usually been opposed by existing network providers. Sometimes they’re opposed by residents because they’re wifi-based. http://www.somerset.gov.uk/somerset/latestnews/pressreleases/details.cfm?releaseID=1493 was deep-sixed after 14 months of its 3-year trial.
Maybe someone else knows the laws about council-run networks?
The way to avoid the £165 pound fine. Go to your master socket in the house. This will have a bottom part that you can unscrew and remove. Behind the panel is another BT Socket, that the front panel plugged into. This effectively disconnects all of your internal wiring. Connect your adsl modem in directly to the back socket. If the problem is still there then it is in the network and not your house.
On the adsl router look at the connection page this will have a some values for quality of the adsl signal being received. Google these to see if your values are acceptable or not.
Here is a good site for the values you may see:
http://phoneworks.net.au/Residential_Services/adsl_troubleshoot.php
@mjray - Interesting - I’m surprised to hear that folks in your area are against wifi-based networks. Interference? The article sounded quite optimistic and well-funded. Too bad.
@fulanoDeTal - what country?
@Stuart Ward - thanks for the link, but my socket doesn’t have a test socket. When the right profile is being used (not the current botch), SNR is over 12dB and Attenuation below 45dB, so it should work.
The engineer visited this morning and found no fault with either their line or my house wiring. Now to wait and see what happens next…
@mjray I was in the same boat with Eclipse; last autumn my connection spontaneously failed after about six years of continuous and rock-solid stability at ~6Mbps. I provided all sorts of debug info from my ZyXEL router, but apparently it meant nothing to Eclipse (now KCOM, of course) engineers (disappointing compared with when I originally signed up). Borrowed filters and a router from cms and the problem continued, so I reluctantly began to head down the Special Investigation route. One evening, it just started working again, then stopped after a few days, then started again a few days later. Eventually, I got a call from a BT engineer in the exchange. I reckon they jiggled something to break it, and jiggled it back to fix it again, but they weren’t fessing up to that to either me or Eclipse.
@Stuart Nearly, but you’d also need to test with a known-good router too in order to be completely confident that you won’t be liable for the fee.
My ADSL line went shitty after a lightening strike that was close enough for the flash and the bang to be pretty much simultaneous. About half the systems in my house rebooted, crashed or broke. After that, my previously solid 7Mbit/s ADSL would spend hours bumping along the bottom at 100Kbit/s or less, then do 5Mbit/s — the slow periods generally being out-of-hours, so when offered the same bet I pretty much knew it would be running fast when the engineer called.
I set up a script to log the state of the link every five minutes (data rates, S/N etc.) to an sqllite database, and then plotted them, and also printed out the BT MAX rate change data (that is available via UKFSN’s account pages) to show that my graphs were supported by BT’s own data.
When the engineer came, he was clearly very pleased with my graphs, and told me that policy would normally have forced him to tell me that there was nothing much wrong, but that he’d be able to justify checking at the exchange (especially sine the graphs had convinced him to monitor the line noise for longer than usual, which was showing some weirdness).
When he got to the exchange, he phoned me and said “wow! you’ve had ADSL for a long time — this is a first generation card — not seen one of them for ages — I’ll swap it out”
I’ve had better than 7Mbit/s ever since — shame it took them about 8 months to look at the exchange, despite me telling them repeatedly that it was obviously the lightening strike that did it, and that I’d tried four different routers, as many splitters, and associated wiring, and was plugged into the bare master socket, with no other wires in sight. BTW I got a selection of routers from tesco and took them back when I was done.
@MJR “a license to hang cables from the telegraph poles? Is that possible? ”
I bet it isn’t possible in the UK, or someone would have done it by now.
As Albert says, this is normal in the US. Cable companies and competitive phone companies hang their coax and twisted pairs on the power company’s poles, even in some densely populated suburbs. I am disappointed to hear that some areas are outlawing it.
BT Openreach lines hang from Southern Electric’s power poles and old GPO poles. Someone please tell me why another business can’t or won’t put copper or fibre there too.