I previously posted how a recent replacement of the pole suppling my FTTC broadband resulted in my speed dropping from around 70Mbps to a measly 20Mbps or so.
I reported a fault on BT's website and, to their credit, a BT technician arrived to investigate a couple of days later. He confirmed the issue with the speed but of course insisted on replacing my Master Socket and the extension socket into which I plug my SH2, using Openreach 5C master sockets. He also tried a new SH2, and a new cable between the extension socket and my SH2. None of this made any improvement - which didn't surprise me because it seemed clear that the problem was with a connection on the new pole.
Anyhow, having taken these actions, the BT technician was then able to report to his line management that the problem "was outside" - which of course it was - and this enabled BT to call out Openreach to take a look at it.
The Openreach technician again arrived promptly and quickly found the problem with the connections at the top of the pole - which had been left with a fault by the Openreach contractor that replaced the pole. However, this only got my broadband speed up to around 50Mbps. The Openreach technician then replaced the entire cable from my roof eves (where the cable from the pole is attached to a junction box) all the way to my Master Socket, spending a good couple of hours doing this. However, this resulted in no improvement to the 50Mbps speed. However, he tested the speed at the master socket and declared it was around 79Mbps. So there was no more that he could do, indicating that there must be a fault with my extension wiring - that happened coincidentally with the pole replacement!
I left the SH2 connected for around a week to see if DLM would improve the speed and it did - but only up to around 56Mbps. So I then purchased a long lead with a BT plug to RJ11 plug so that I could trail this through the house and plug my SH2 directly into the master socket. This resulted in a speed of 79Mbps - so the Openreach technician was right.
My suspicions then centred on the connection from the master socket to my built-in extension cable, so I remade this and also replaced the newly installed master and extension sockets with the originals.
The result was a broadband speed of 71Mbps - right where I was before the pole replacement!
So it seems the the only fault I had was with the newly replaced pole, but the BT technician is of course unable to investigate this because it is Openreach's territory. Instead, he somehow messed up the connection to my internal extension cable and socket so, when the Openreach technician corrected the pole fault, it still didn't get my speed back to where it was before.
Such are the problems brought on by OFCOM's insistence that BT and Openreach operate completely independently of each other!
