BT Openreach won't replace faulty cable

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My apologies for the long post, but I wanted to provide some background info on my problem and the resolutions already explored before asking for help. My questions are in the last paragraph.

I've recently "upgraded" from ADSL2 to FTTC on the two BT phone lines to my house. The sync rates for down are approximately 50% of their lowest estimate and the up is barely 20%. Both experience regularly falls of greater than 25%, and the lost packets make them unusable for gaming. During any cold, wet or windy weather the losses increase (approximately 5-10% losses and sometimes enough to drop the PPPoE connection to the ISP forcing a reconnect). When on ADSL the lines were rock-solid and syncing at 17.5 down and 1.4 up. (I believe the up was due to "Annex M", but my terminology may be incorrect.)

The service contracts I took out have a guaranteed fault tolerance which is exceeded when BTOR reset the profiles for the lines, but over the following week will always drop below the tolerance again as the packet losses presumably indicate some detectable fault condition so the equipment drops the sync rates down to try and find a stable level. Without the stability they are almost useless as gaming, online video streaming, or anything else of that nature is badly affected.

Because I have the two lines my ISP had to log two different faults to get a BTOR engineer to look at each line. That meant I have had three different engineers attend over the past few days to look at them. All three have extensively tested the lines and various joints were remade at the pole where one was apparently wet. This made no noticeable difference.

Each engineer mentioned that their tests indicated it is likely to be down to the line between the pole and the cabinet 300m away which in their opinion was likely aluminium, slightly degraded after 45 years of use, and couldn't carry the VDSL signals adequately. Apparently other customers in my area have complained about the same thing. They were each mentioned requesting a different team come out to look at replacing the line between the cabinet and the pole, however in my opinion (and theirs) that is very unlikely to happen as BTOR won't spend money when they can just cancel the contract with my ISP without penalty for much less lost. I understand that BT lines are only guaranteed to carry voice signals, which they do with only very intermittent noise (slight crackles *very* occasionally and never when doing a line test).

So at the moment I am left with an average of three re-syncs daily as the line tries to drop down to a stable level, fails, and then drops further. I am hoping that it will find a stable level above ADSL speeds otherwise I will be forced to cancel and return to the rock-solid ADSL (they will revert at no cost to me under my service contract).

I asked the last engineer if I could get a survey done to price up replace the line at my cost, but he said that BTOR would not carry out work privately for costs. I asked if getting a third line to my house would force the cable to be replaced as apparently there are no spare pairs to my pole, but he said they would likely just route a pair from a different pole with spare pairs. I couldn't even get a leased ethernet line from the exchange because once that service contract had ended they would not be able to reuse it for VDSL. FTTP (or FTTPoD) are not available from my cabinet, and in any rate the stupidly-low usage caps on them make them next-to-useless for a family of four all streaming Netflix and playing games.

So finally on to my question:

Are there any keywords or phrases that can be used to get BTOR to either replace the cable themselves, or provide a survey to cost it up for me to pay? I'm surprised they said they wouldn't be able to do the latter as surely a new housing development would pay to have the BT infrastructure installed at their cost? How is that different to FTTPoD? Can I use that as a way of getting new copper lines installed at the same time as fibre, even though they don't offer FTTPoD from my cabinet? I don't want FTTP due to the low usage caps but I would pay for it if it meant I could get the copper replaced at the same time for the FTTC services. Any suggestions would be welcomed.
 
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Are there any keywords or phrases that can be used to get BTOR to either replace the cable themselves, or provide a survey to cost it up for me to pay?

BT Openreach dont deal direct with consumers but only with who their contract is with who are either the ISP or Telephone provider (this is still the case when the ISP is BT) As you've found out you have to chase all faults through your provider on not direct with Openreach.

There was a story on Watchdog last week on Openreach (worth a watch on iPlayer if you line can manage that) and the fact that they're a law upon themselves.
 
Unfortunately as your contract is with your ISP you will have to pressurise them to provide what THEY promise, not BT themselves. You don't have a contract with BT as such so they won't really entertain your request for cable upgrades (which is the most likely problem I would agree).
 
If your service isnt working because of a fault.

Contact your serivce provider and ask for help, if they refuse tell them they have broken the supply contract and you wont pay any more money until its ressolved and you want compensating for the down time.

Unfortunatley money talks, but some companies are good with dealing with customers.

Good luck
 
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I have every sympathy for you, but sorry to say you are facing a very difficult problem. Bt upgrade aluminium in their own time based on the number of faults proved to it over a period and how accurate the faults point to that particular section of cable (most bang for their buck). if the whole 300m length is cumulatively not good for broadband, it won't be as attractive as a single segment of cable elsewhere that keeps showing disconnection faults within a 20m section. not helped by engineers saying it's probably aluminium rather than it's the length between hole a and hole b

need to get the ear of someone at director level who can force the issue i think, and even then it takes a long time.
 
This is a age old problem, the speed/bandwidth is increased and the signal will start to error like mad, you will have a high number of CRC errors which once they hit a certain level the line will drop and re-sync at a lower rate to try and stabilise the service. By the law of averages and the amount of engineers you have had out it sounds like the aluminium cable that you have mentioned is the problem, getting openreach to replace the cable will be difficult but they have done it in the past, its down to your ISP to act on your behalf and get the problem escalated to the directors office. It would be easy to narrow down where the length of cable starts and finishes, there may even be a old wet buried joint where the cable has been repaired after its been damaged, this depends on where you live, if your down a farm lane then very likely, if your in housing estate the not so likely. Good luck
:)
P.S broadband can be a nightmare to fault its not like a line fault, in a past life I visited one end user three times after they went from adsl one to adsl 2 it was perfect before and once the bandwidth was increased it was erroring like mad, I changed everything and it turned out to be one crimp inside the front door which was perfectly made and dry but once it was changed Bang all was good, the next engineer you get tell him to check for blue beans and REIN ,he will know what that means but fttc does not like ali cable.
 
Thanks for the comments so far.

Another engineer visited this morning and managed to trace the problem to the joint between the copper cabling that serves most of the "link" and an aluminium cable that does the final quarter or so to the cabinet. I believe he was a broadband engineer rather than just dealing with the line side and was very thorough. That last segment was definitely aluminium on his plans. Unofficially he mentioned that he has seen other examples just like this and is not aware of any being fixed. The aluminium cable is responsible for the low sync rates as it just can't carry the signal, but also as mentioned by Simon the different frequencies react to the conductors and joints differently hence the noise at VDSL frequencies causing the constant erratic data loss that was not present at ADSL or voice ones. In his opinion BTW should not have enabled the cabinet knowing about the local cabling because VDSL services would perform at best on-par with ADSL, and at worse provide a lesser service. Bear in mind that BTW are estimating that my lines can sync at 60Mbps down with 12.6Mbps up with an impacted line (and report mine as "clean"). I get a fraction of that.

As it is I am considering downgrading one of the FTTC lines back to ADSL2 and keeping that exclusively for gaming/streaming from the consoles/TVs, and use the remaining FTTC line for just file downloading and web browsing, etc., where the packet losses are not as noticeable. My provider has confirmed they are able to do this FOC because the service provided is less than the fault threshold BTW guaranteed.

The engineer today was not aware of anyone having a cable replaced at their cost as it is not something he has ever been asked before, but has left a message with the surveying team to see if it is possible and will call back and let me know when he hears from them. Likewise for FTTPoD, which theoretically he believes should be possible as the client pays all costs anyway, but we both agreed that there must be a reason why BTW say it is not supported from my serving FTTC cabinet.

My ISP is being helpful and doing what they can to escalate it, but as mentioned unless there are many more local clients reporting the same problems BTOR are unlikely to do anything about it.
 
It took 2 years to get my office ISP to persuade Openreach to investigate the reason for our service regularly dropping out, this is after them insisting the line was fine, and it was the Modem which was replaced TWICE at our expense!! eventually an OR engineer confirmed that our line was bad (we knew this wanyway because of all the noise on the line!! fortunately there were spare pairs within our cable as we are approx 3 Km from the box!
Openreach are a law unto themselves - in any other industry they would never get away with it :(
 
You can find ceo email by searching for that term online and you will be provided with the email address you needed to get things done.

Cant say it will make things resolve in minutes but often customer service teams are so very poor and have limited resources, when things come from the top down action is usually very quick in comparision.

Just be polite and request asistance in the email and apologise for the need of taking up the ceo's time. Should hear something within 48 hrs even if its just an acknowledgement you may have to wait till the next working day.

CEO's tend to look at there email every day and pass it down the chain of command very quickly.
 
Got to agree with secureiams post.. every time you ring up to report a fault they will just read off a script and the circle starts again.. email the CEO and be polite and direct of what the problems are... if you get no joy raise a official customer complaint and although not sure about openreach a lot of companies have a budget for issues like these.... be prepared for a long drawn out saga
 

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