Hello everyone.
I want to preface this by saying that I am not the account holder, so I personally cannot get help from BT. I am the household's dedicated "techie" so I have been the one trying to fix our issues. The account holder works in a role where the circumstances make it hard for him to contact BT for an engineer without booking a day off work, so we're trying everything we can prior to going down that route.
We have a Smart Hub 2, and I believe we're FTTC (we don't have an ONT, but when connected the hub reports the connection as Fibre broadband). The hub is plugged into our main phone socket using a microfilter, and without any kind of splitters or other devices attached. We do not have any other phone sockets. We also no longer have landline service, and even when plugging a phone directly into the socket there is no line noise at all (copper service was disabled many moons ago and line noise stopped after that point).
On Saturday August 30th, our router was flashing orange and had no internet connection. In the hub manager, it reported a status of "Connecting". After a reboot in the GUI, there was no change except for the router losing the current date and time in the event logs (reverted to October 1st of an unknown year).
Over the course of the week, we left the hub without power for 24 hours, did a factory reset from the hub manager, did a factory reset using the pinhole button, disabled wifi, unplugged all ethernet cables, and tried the test socket. None of these things resolved the outage. As mentioned, there is no line noise from a phone - but this has been the case since the copper shutdown. The router correctly identifies a disconnected broadband cable and shows flashing purple when this is the case. Other than the incorrect time and date, the event log only shows two logs of note: SIP WAN DOWN when the initial outage happened, and "Has a problem connecting to SAAF framework (4 times)" which appears exactly one time whenever the router is booting up.
Now, this is actually my second time writing this post. Our neighbour had kindly provided us with an old Plusnet router for testing, and I had actually managed to get said router connected to BT and all was good. I wasn't happy with this as the older router has poorer wifi capabilities. I plugged the BT router back in and came to write my post here, hoping that someone may be able to provide information as to whether our Smart Hub 2 simply died or if this did actually suggest a connection issue. While I was writing my post, the BT router came up completely fine. Hub manager showed system uptime of 35 min and network uptime of 8 min. Event log was also much healthier looking, with SAAF framework issues replaced with lots of good looking PPP and pbthdm logs. Being the fool I am, I unplugged the BT router from the socket and tried to see if there was now line noise... And now the BT router is down and refusing to connect again.
I did just reconnect the Plusnet router, confirmed it could get online, and then reconnected the BT router in hopes that whatever magic that the Plusnet router did might happen again. Currently sat at about 25 minutes of system uptime as I write this, so perhaps it will come back online shortly, but failing that does anyone have any information on what exactly this seems to be? My theory was that the Smart Hub 2 may indeed be dying and need to be replaced - but the Plusnet router seemingly jumpstarting our line has me thinking that it's an issue on BT's side instead.
