My Router Went Down On Me

My connection has become intermittent from time to time. I only recently twigged it happens when it rains, and tried plugging in a phone (I no longer use the landline on account of the endless spam sales calls).

Judas F Priest, it's a wonder it's been working at all in between the crackling, squelching and burbling that's occurring.

I should be able to get a graph of usage and a whole bunch of other stats but it no longer seems to be where it was. I'll ring my ISP tomorrow and set them to work biting BT's heels until the mend it. In the meantime if I suddenly disa

chris c wrote:My connection has become intermittent from time to time. I only recently twigged it happens when it rains, and tried plugging in a phone (I no longer use the landline on account of the endless spam sales calls).

Judas F Priest, it's a wonder it's been working at all in between the crackling, squelching and burbling that's occurring.

I should be able to get a graph of usage and a whole bunch of other stats but it no longer seems to be where it was. I'll ring my ISP tomorrow and set them to work biting BT's heels until the mend it. In the meantime if I suddenly disa

I had similar problems a couple of years ago after a few phone calls a new router solved it, I just told them if they didn't sort it I would be asking for my mac code new router arrived three days later 

My guys are pretty good, they have a semiautomated system that pings your line every second and usually they have mended a problem before it came to your attention. Many times they have alerted BT to a line or exchange problem they didn't even know they had.

A neighbour had AOL. When his line died he ran up a humungous phone bill talking to their droids in India and getting nowhere. I told him to get his MAC and join Andrews and Arnold (anyone who owns that domain name must be worth doing business with!) they aren't cheap until something goes wrong, then they really pay for themselves. It still took them three days of relentless kicking before BT fixed the broken line card in the exchange. AOL never contacted BT at all though it was obviously their problem, they just continued raking in the cash from their premium rate complaints number.

chris c wrote:(I no longer use the landline on account of the endless spam sales calls).

I'm also plagued with spam calls my phone has a big colour screen and with caller ID I don't accept calls from numbers I don't recognise and I can bar the persistent ones, unlike the latest BT phone though I cant bar withheld and international calls.

That said I do occasionally like to have a play with them  one way is to pick up the phone put it on speakerphone and don't say a word and listen to the frustrated hello's for the call centre.

Another is to let them enjoy the laughing bag  

You're just giving shiny ideas about how to deflect @Eddie s call now.

"My Router Went Down On Me" Where did you get it Chris I want one like that.

Coat on and out the door.

I took the line from an old friend when he said "my server just went down on me!"

Judas F Priest what a nightmare! The BT Engineer arrived around 12. The junction box on my eaves where the line enters the house looked like a good candidate for rain incursion so he climbed a ladder remembering to put on his hard hat first. The wire was just held together by a thread of rust.

"Piece of piss!" he said, "you'll soon be sorted."

Just for good measure he ran a test on the line that went into the house, and had probably been there since the place was built 50 years ago.

"Good grief! It's a wonder anything worked at all, there's a major problem!" 

He ended up putting in a new dropwire and nearly ruptured himself drilling through the very hard bricks.

Then he ran another test "No there's something else going on" and buggered off to the local green cabinet.

An hour or so later he came back and pulled up the hatch in the pavement down the road. "I can't tell where the fault is, I'll run some tests from this end".

The cable ends were wrapped in a plastic bag inside a supposedly waterproof plastic box which wasn't, obviously. He cut off the rotten ends of the cables and recrimped them. While he was there he noticed that a whole bunch of other people's cables were also at the end of their life and recrimped some of the worst ones. Likely all the cabling was as old as the houses.

Then he tried to run some more line tests and discovered his test kit appeared to have failed and wouldn't reboot.

In the end I plugged the router into the new socket and got around 12 Mb/sec, about what I used to have before the problems started, so he went on his way with a beer token I gave him since he'd spent about four hours faffing around, and strongly suspecting he'd be back as some of the other lines in the street also started to crap out.

Since he left the speed seems to have dropped back to around 3Mb/sec, weird since the voice line is now clear as a bell. Or maybe I'm confused between bits and bytes. Anyway time for a lie down.

Baruney wrote:You're just giving shiny ideas about how to deflect @Eddie s call now.

Not a good idea @Baruney , you do realise I'll be taking all the flak for your shiny ideas considering my post