SMARTHUB2 - No Dial Tone on 431A Socket

[iniltous]

No criticism but it’s remarkable how often its the case with issues posted on here , that what turns out to be a critical detail ( that maybe seemed relatively unimportant to the OP ) isn’t mentioned until quite late on , which has the potential to change every assumption previously made by others attempting to figure out what’s going on…

If your copper pair service was ‘moved’ to a physically closer copper / FTTC cabinet from one that was originally serving your address ( something rarely done by Openreach possibly for reasons such as this ) , was this at your request or something Openreach did without any lobbying from you ? .

This may be fundamentally the core of the issue ….the PSTN switch off is agnostic to which FTTC cabinet you are on , it’s an exchange level action so switching your legacy telephone service off is not affected by you swapping FTTC cabinets in the past , but the FTTC ‘cabinet’ and ‘port’ information recorded for your address is critical, if it’s not accurate then issues will occur

…..to simplify, say originally you were connected to ‘Cab A’ the FTTC port allocated has to be physically associated with that  cabinet to set up the FTTC service …..if through some local Openreach rearrangement you were informally ‘moved’ to a physically closer copper/ FTTC cabinet , that was never intended to service your address , say that’s ‘Cab B’ then unless the central records were also changed this local re-arrangement isn’t noted in every system , that’s potentially why you appear to be offline when you are online , and the wrong ‘router’ is  observed to when your equipment could be remotely detected, they  are accessing your  previous connection in  ’Cab A’ , the data held doesn’t reflect the physical reality anymore.

With this new information, it suggests  that centrally you are still recorded on ‘Cab A’ and the DV service has been applied to the cabinet and port that you used to be served from , even though you are now physically connected to ‘Cab B’ , for whatever reason the DV ‘setup’  is unaware of that fact  , and although some local ‘jiggerypokery’ was successful in delivering your broadband it isn’t recorded everywhere that you you are connected to ‘Cab B’ , hence why you have no DV service …..did you have much ‘hassle’ getting the FTTC connection working once you were physically moved from cabinet ‘A’ to ‘B’ ?

[jfs99]

Thanks for your comments. BT Telesales were pushing "Superfast Broadband" in 2018 but I declined after discovering from https://www.dslchecker.bt.com that my connection to cabinet A was too far away to get the additional speed over a copper pair. They tried to sell their hgh speed product again the following year and when I explained that my physical cabinet was still 1500 metres away this time the reponse was, "Oh, no, you can get it now. You should now be connected to Cabinet B which is at the end of your lane". On that basis I signed up for their new service.

In the short term it was a disaster because BT sales staff were using maps showing only physical proximity to FTTC cabinets, rather than the accurate information stored on their own DSL database (which at the time was still available to the public). Eventually, after submitting maps and photographs of the physical layout showing the line of telegraph poles, subterranean entry point and optional pathways to the two cabinets etc., they agreed with my suggestion and re-routed the physical connection to Cabinet B (~500 metres away). Whether they would have figured it out eventually without my prompting is a moot point. Obviously, the work was carried out by Openreach but it appears, based on your comments, that the modified connection point was never relayed to the appropriate department within BT.

Once the copper had been rerouted to Cabinet B we began to receive the contracted speed and the broadband and telephone service have worked reliably ever since. Earlier this year, when it came time to renew the BT Halo contract (which I knew would involve the switch to DV) I agreed to BT's offer to send out an Openreach engineer to ensure that we were ready to go in terms of home equipment, Master Socket 5, copper routing and cabinet connection. He gave it a thumbs up and said we were ready to move to digital telephony.

Considering the cast of players involved in this debacle, who could (or should) have known that a six year-old patch was going to come back and frustrate the move to DV? BT? Openreach? Surely no one would seriously expect customers to assume such responsibility?

I am going to pass on your comments to the Executive Complaints representative assigned to the case. I've already mentioned in the initial letter of complaint my suspicion that there may be a connection with the events of 2019, but now I'm almost certain that this is where they need to start looking. Thanks again.

[jfs99 · Accepted solution]

The digital telephone service was finally turned on today. According to BT's DV team:

"The IP Address linked to your hub was showing against another hub, which can't be. We had to reset your IP Address to avoid any confusion with the credentials held in your hub or against your broadband service."

So presumably they're talking about the IP address of the fibre-to-copper media converter located in the cabinet....?

Thank you all for your help.