Deja Vu
On Tuesday 5th March our broadband and phone went down. I contacted the BT Help webchat to find out what happened and went through the rigmarole of identity and basic checks, including instructions on a factory reset. I foolishly allowed myself to be persuaded to do this in spite of fearing that it would lose the phone configuration on the hub ( which had been so difficult to get set up originally ). I was assured that this would come back up with the broadband. Sure enough the phone config was wiped. It then transpired that the issue was a local exchange fault on Openreach. Broadband came back after a few hours...but not the phone.
This led me once more into the surreal world of BT customer services, including an unnecessary engineer visit, contact with about 6 different advisors, fault report listing the wrong issue and being closed out as reported by us to be fixed when the opposite was the case, promised phone calls which never happened etc.
Bizarrely the engineer visit was on the exact 1 year anniversary of this happening originally. The point of this post however is to share some things learned when DV has not been automatically installed originally.
The hub cannot be configured locally on site. No visiting engineer has the means to do this on the hub. The configuration has to be downloaded to the hub by someone in BT Central with the magic code....and this needs to be insisted on.
If you had problems getting set up initially...DO NOT do a factory reset without very careful consideration.
Also be aware that if you change the hub for any reason, due to a fault for instance, you might not get it configured unless the primary issue of associating the phone with the broadband connection has been fixed.
On Saturday 9th March , still with no phone, I had a long interaction with a first level advisor by webchat and remarkably, but true to her word she got it fixed (Thank you). Phone restored by the next morning.
Hope the account of these experiences helps
