After DV how do I find out where a fault is ?

[stereohaven]

In answer to the original question, I have a SOGEA line and VOIP service and my speed was steadily falling over a number of months.

I knew there was a problem with the line, but in my case I couldn't get my ISP to do anything until it eventually dropped below the minimum speed guarantee, as whatever they called 'line testing' didn't show any issues. This meant I spent 6 months at limited speed as I had no idea what testing I could do my end to prove a fault.

Their first response was to send out one of their "tech experts" to eliminate internals, I ended up with new wiring, Openreach faceplate, hub etc. but it didn't have an impact. Only then would they arrange an Openreach engineer.

On the subsequent visit by Openreach, after 2 hours of investigation he concluded that the underground cable to my house was damaged and needed fixing or repairing. The reality being my speed was compromised in the last 15 metres as he could measure the full sync speed at the next maintenance hatch up the path. 

5 days later another engineer who was good at this stuff worked out exactly where the problem  was and marked up the path, then 2 days after that another Openreach crew turned up and replaced the cable.

The day after that, Openreach man number 4 disconnected the old line and put me on new pair in the new cable and I am once again maxed out at the 40/10 profile I was put on. 2 of the Openreach engineers are adamant the line can support closer to 60Mbps, hence I am returning to Fibre 1 with BT.

I know my connection and if I could have found a way to report the fault before the significant speed drop, I wouldn't have had to live with a compromised speed for so long, nor would my ISP have had to pay out so much automatic compensation. 

[iniltous]

In this case , there is nothing to suggest that being able to report the telephony service ‘noisy’ would have reduced the time to resolve the line issue, the testing regime, if failing to recognise the line fault with a broadband issue isn’t any more likely to have indicated a line fault simply because it were raised on the telephony side, ….as you say you are returning to BT Fibre 1 , who was your provider during this episode ? . If it were not BT then how they approached a fault report isn’t necessarily the same as other ISP’s.

The OP was with DV , how to isolate the internal wiring from the external, and in that case the demarcation point is the same , it’s the NTE test port.

[Bob1001]

@iniltous  Thank you, I was just curious the router is no problem I had previously bought a smarthub2 from BT (but not got round to fitting it) and prior to DV they sent me a new one, so I have a spare.

The problem that has no solution remains that you can't split the bands on the smarthub 2.

[stereohaven]

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@iniltouswrote:

In this case , there is nothing to suggest that being able to report the telephony service ‘noisy’ would have reduced the time to resolve the line issue, the testing regime, if failing to recognise the line fault with a broadband issue isn’t any more likely to have indicated a line fault simply because it were raised on the telephony side, ….as you say you are returning to BT Fibre 1 , who was your provider during this episode ? . If it were not BT then how they approached a fault report isn’t necessarily the same as other ISP’s.

The OP was with DV , how to isolate the internal wiring from the external, and in that case the demarcation point is the same , it’s the NTE test port.

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Sure, but there is no option to do anything that helped was my point.

My SOGEA line was provisioned by BT and I had a Smart Hub 2 and Digital Voice prior to moving to Sky. I was on the Digital Voice trial and raised the lack of testing to troubleshoot at the time.

I was just pointing out that I knew it wasn't an internal fault but I was unable to do anything of value to expedite it with Sky or BT once I had been moved.

In my scenario the fault was with the copper pair, literally right outside the front door. I had service degradation with BT before moving to a SOGEA service and the simple line testing showed a fault quickly. Openreach came out within a few days and it was a problem with water ingress at one of the maintenance hatches. 

I don't proclaim to be an expert on this, just providing my real world feedback. Pre SOGEA with normal phone line tests available, fault reporting was easy and worked in my experience. Once on SOGEA, all line tests that I can run with Sky give the line a clean bill of health even once it drops below the guarantee, so is as much use as a chocolate teapot. 

I appreciate that may not be the same with BT, but I had perhaps wrongly assumed all ISPs would have access to the same Openreach tests.

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[Tom20001]

@Bob1001 Why is that a problem?