Posts by orb8

Re: it could divert 1.6 billion nuisance calls a year.

No need to sign-up to BT.. As long as you have caller id enabled with your phone provider you can use the number blocking features on the DECT phones..

We're with Sky and were getting fed-up with the amount of random nuisance calls we were getting (about 4 per day.) We ended up buying a BT 8600 Advanced Call Blocker DECT phone.. After putting all the friends and family numbers into the phone we now don't get ANY nuisance calls at all. If somebody calls from say the hospital or doctors etc those calls are filtered by the phone itself and the caller has to give their name before getting any further (we don't hear this part) Then we then get a message and option asking us whether we want to accept that call or not. It's brill.

"because much of their last mile is coax that was laid 20+ years ago"

Were I live near Southport our coax is as old as the homes here, which makes

it at least 40 years old. No wonder whenever there's a bit of rain folks house phones

become noisy and frustration of days of dropping broadband kicks in until the connections

dry out again.

Exactly the same happened to us.. But in my case it took complaints spanning 5 years and approx 15 visits by Openreach engineers to fix our issue.. Even though I had asked for them to please just send somebody up the pole not 50 feet from our home to inspect the connections inside the poles top black box. I had suspected water ingress inside said black box as I was sure that directional weather conditions over the years were contributing to this issue as this is when the internet connection would drop.

I had explained the problem over and over to our broadband providers BT, then SKY. And even every Openreach engineer that visited got the story, plus the pages of notes I kept regarding connection dropout times, rain conditions, windy weather, router stats etc etc..

Everybody got the message that *when there was strong winds/heavy rain etc from a South-Westerly direction, the phone line would get very noisy, it would then start crackling and perhaps a day or so later once water had had time to soak-in, the router would show a falling Downstream/Upstream Noise Margin, then the connection would start to drop out!*

This to me was water penetration somewhere! A few days later the phone line noise would decrease, and the broadband would become usable again once the Noise Margin recovered... This was until the next spell of wind/rain!

One afternoon a we actually got an engineer who wasn't afraid of going up the pole. Which was great as I was getting so peeved-off that I was going to get up the bloody thing myself to take a look. Previous engineers were telling us that they were not allowed to go up the pole. Hmmm!

Anyway this engineer went up the pole & 5 minutes later came back to our house with the connector strip that was inside the box at the top of the pole.. It was green with corrosion and basically falling apart in his hands.. Even he was amazed at how it had degraded!

So a piece of equipment that I had suspected to be problematic for years turned out to be the culprit. I wonder how much money BT could have saved if they'd have just sent someone up that pole 5 years before?

Re: Tinfoil Hat time?

According to this site it's mainly Europe that's always struggling with data flow, and It's always showing a downward trend.

http://internettrafficreport.com/

Re: More metal kit that blocks and thus drops more calls.

Perhaps try the Ballistic shell Gel Case. Works a treat :)

A portable 350.12hp generator on a trailer would do fine :)

Re: A nice lady rang me up the other day...

^^ That is soooo correct.

I'm sure BT and others are trying to make everybody believe that because they're installing fibre to cabinets. This then is the best broadband possible, when it's not! Until BT gets their thumbs out of their butts and start installing FTTP problems will arrise for those that have long lines, degraded copper and in out case copper, or a cabinet that is affected a couple of days after rain.

FTTC is just a temporary measure, until they can be bothered to spend some of their massive profits renewing copper wire that the dinosaurs connected up!

Re: Depressing...

^ ^ This