An outreach bloke has been up a pole in the street in the past three days fiddling around with a black box. It is now only possible to get broadband connection here with the phone off the hook. Very inconvenient. Does any tech person know what has happened? It seems to me that he has messed about with incoming signals on broadband v phone. I have a belkin connection which may confuse the matter but it hasn't been a problem before.

I take it you mean Openreach?

The broadband and voice signals come down the same pair of wires so usually any line fault affects both to some degree.

First thing to do is to eliminate as much of your wiring as possible. So if you have an NTE5 type master socket, with the two part front panel, remove the lower section to reveal the test socket. Plug just the broadband router into this socket without a phone. Test like that to see if it works OK.

Once you are satisfied it works like that plug the phone in and see what happens. If you still have to take the phone off hook to use broadband then try another phone if you have one (or can borrow one).

Also try an alternative filter, not unknown for filters to fail.

If the broadband only works if either no phone or with a phone off hook and with any filter you try then chances are it is a line fault.

If it works with your phone plugged in and on hook then the problem could be your house wiring or something plugged into an extension socket.

If the broadband does not work with your phone on hook but does with another then it's your phone.

If it all works fine on the test socket then you need to go round the house checking all the extensions and whatever is plugged into them to try and work out where the fault lies.

You need to be as sure as you can be that it is a line fault before calling your service provider. If they send someone out to test the line and it turns out to be your wiring/filter/phone you could be looking at the wrong end of a 100 quid plus call out charge. if it is a network fault you should not be charged. So worthwhile doing some basic checks first.

Yes - I did mean Openreach.

There is an accountability problem that I will raise with my MP.

When Openreach engineers come and go on several occasions in a street of 15 houses, messing around with a black box at the top of a pole and scratching their heads, then I think when they leave and a customer experiences problems immediately he should have a right to know what that work entailed and whether it is complete. That arguably is especially true of BT customers. Instead, there is a stone wall on such information to everyone.

I have been advised by someone from BT on a line that was so bad even she admitted it sounded like we were on different planets from each other that officially the line is still fine and it is "a problem inside". As you indicate, they would charge almost £130 for an engineer to visit if he believed that the problem was in the home and, of course, he would because he has absolutely no reason to admit that it is anything to do with mistakes that an Openreach engineer may have made. That is not good enough. I'm also going to BBC's You and Yours if the problem isn't sorted this afternoon.

Incidentally, one of the first things they ask for is an alternative contact number. I don't have one. When I buy a loaf of bread, I don't buy another loaf of bread in case the first is mouldy. And I have had not dissimilar problems with TT in the past. I did think that going to BT would at least be easier given that Openreach is under their umbrella but clearly not. There is an irony that the communication business is among the most lousy at communicating.

Openreach work on behalf of the service providers, they don't generally deal with the end users (ie you and me). They are also not allowed to give preferential treatment to any particular service provider, all have to be dealt with equally. So BT get the same service as TT or anyone else. And you can be sure that if they didn't the service providers would be raising hell with Ofcom.

It would really be down to your service provider to warn you of any network work that could potentially impact on your service not Openreach. After all you are a customer of the service provider not Openreach.

Openreach should not really care where a fault is. They get paid by the service providers to maintain and fix the network regardless of where a fault lies. If the fault is on your side of the master socket though your service provider (not Openreach) is likely to charge you a call-out charge.

You must have met some of the "jobsworth" Openreach guys if you believe that they are not willing to admit to faults in the network affecting a service. It's my experience that most of them are only too willing to do so.

BT Wholesale certainly won't. I had no end of trouble (via a very competent ISP who was banging their head on the desk like me) trying to get them to admit to exchange congestion issues when everyone except BT Wholesale could work out what the problem was.

As is typical for BT, they denied the fault, tried to send someone to my house (nope, it's not an issue with the line, it connected flawlessly to the exchange) and the issue eventually resolved itself like "magic".

I did have someone out when I first got ADSL and there was a clear issue with it (connected at 2Mbps effortlessly, paying for 2Mbps, getting 1Mbps max) as I didn't know better. The Openreach tech (or it may have been just before its creation and was still "BT") changed a junction box on the line, plugged in his own laptop and declared that all was well because his modem connected and played a test video. The problem eventually sorted itself out, not that BT admitted it

Why? If I'm getting work done on my line, and the technician breaks ny neighbour's line, the neighbour certainly has a right to have his line fixed, and to know what was broken on his part, but it's none of his business what work was originally being done on my line. It would irritate me if my private business with a service provider was being shared with some other customer.


Well, they'll charge the fee if the problem turns out to have been in your home, just just if they think it is, and you would be fully entitled to see a detailed explanation of the fault, and why you were being charged.


That's purely for convenience, yours and theirs. If your line is faulty, or if they have to disconnect it to perform tests, they may not be able to call you on it, so they'll ask for an alternative like a mobile. I've had that happen, they've called me back on the mobile while testing, asking me to hang up or power-cycle equipment. If you don't have an alternative phone they may need to send someone out, with all the extra costs that entails.

Thanks for all the comments above.

The updated position is:

1. BT on Tuesday lunchtime said that they would ring me at the same time the following day to see if the situation had improved with my in-house tests. They didn't ring then and haven't done since.

2. On Tuesday afternoon, I was advised by the guy who I rang to say I wanted to leave BT not to be hasty as they were monitoring the line for 72 hours. Did I know that? I said no. More than 72 hours on, the position is unchanged.

3. I am not at all convinced that the problem is internal but have decided to put the £130 I could easily have taken off me for a call out into a new computer. If the situation is no different with that installed, I'll be writing letters.