BT have finally fixed my phone line

After the lightning strike just over a month ago, BT Openreach came to my house and performed a ‘temporary’ repair to get my phone line working again.  This consisted of bypassing a broken pair of conductors and using another pair within the same cable.  The technician told me he wasn’t able to change the wire to the pole so would have to book a cherry picker to come and do it.  The phone line worked but my broadband was a little flaky and there was sometimes a crackle on voice calls.

Last week I checked the status of my repair on the BT website but it said that the call was closed.  I rang BT to ask about this and so a fresh call was logged.  I was asked to contact Openreach myself to get an update which I did but they’re only allowed to talk to providers so were unable to help me.  I went back to BT and explained the situation again and this time they told me I’d be guaranteed a fix by 1st August.  That evening on the way home I had a text from BT telling me that my fault had been fixed.  *sigh*.

Once home I looked on the web site again and once more it said my call had been fixed.  I clicked the re-open button and typed “The cable is supposed to have been replaced, it hasn’t been replaced.”.  The following morning I checked the call status again to see that an engineer was scheduled for this morning between 08:00 and 13:00.

Amusingly, I had a further text last night telling me of my appointment and saying that I should call them before 2PM (I received the text at 19:30) if I needed to rearrange the appointment!

BT Openreach called me this morning just after 08:00 saying they were on their way.  A gentleman arrived just around 08:30 and after a conversation he decided to replace the entire cable from my house to the telegraph pole and due to the way my internal telephone extension was wired, he suggested re-routing the external cable so that the master BT socket would be in my shack.  Naturally I liked this idea because it means my ADSL modem will be directly attached to the outside world rather than going through a very old length of internal wire.  This was all done and he also fitted a new master socket to replace my old one.

He was all done by 11:00 and so I left for work.  I’m confident that this will give my ADSL connection a slight boost and the phone should be back to the crackle-free line it used to be.

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  1. Hi Keith,
    See what happens when you get someone who knows what they’re doing, a proper engineer. Very few and far between now at BT.
    The Cherrypicker would have been needed because you can’t go on aflat roof/ladders to high/etc all H&S rules that 5 years ago nobody thought anything about. Progress. Glad you back to full strength. 73 Bob

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