A Tale of Two Dropwires

A few weeks ago, one of my neighbours, a BT Broadband customer, reported that both her broadband and her telephone had become unusable. Like all of us, she has a long-term problem with REIN which causes routers to lose sync with the DSLAM at the exchange at least once every 24 hours; more frequently in wet or windy weather.

She, like several others of us, also has a long-standing phone problem that I've written about before. Basically, it's almost impossible to hear a caller if one villager makes a phone call to another.

This time though, the problem was a little different. Phone calls within the village can be made, but one or both parties can't hear the other. Long distance calls aren't as bad, but recipients often complain of low volume, whilst we can hear them reasonably well. Most people have no clicks or other noises on the line and BT tests always show that the line is OK.

My neighbour's specific problem was as follows. The line, from the drop pole pictured above, suffered all of the above problems, but she was now get noises on the line. Some of these were irregular clicks and another irregular noise that sounded like someone sucking their teeth. Underlying these irregular noises was a very high-pitched whine that came in regular pulses - about 1-2 seconds on and 1-2 seconds off. It was right on the limit of my hearing, but my younger neighbour heard it clearly.

Self-help measures like changing the phone (to wired, not DECT) made a small difference to the sound volume heard in local calls, but didn't stop the line noises. A DECT phone wired to the Master socket sounded like a jet engine running at full throttle in the background.

As a phone call progressed, the irregular noises built in intensity and within a minute, the broadband connection lost sync and wouldn't regain it. Even rebooting the router, or returning it to factory defaults failed to have any effect. Openreach engineers came on several occasions, played with a few things and the broadband recovered, but two different HomeHubs (a 1.5 or 2.0) would lose sync and not regain it as soon as a phone call was made, or if the router was simply left on overnight.

All the obvious things were tried by Openreach, the "pair" was changed (the original pair was found to be unbalanced - it took them 2 years to work that out despite several Openreach visits during this time), there was a "lift and shift" at the exchange, all internal extensions were disconnected, the Master socket was replaced, etc, etc.

Finally, Openreach took a look at the dropwire, which was damaged. Once they had sorted this out, the router regained sync and seems to have been reasonably reliable since - in other words, back to its normal slow speed. The underlying phone phone problem within the village has improved slightly, but is still there! Interestingly, the A1024 Openreach fault tag is still nailed to the drop pole.

Now the only reason Openreach persisted with this case and partially solved it was because the fault had been escalated within BT to the staff in the Director's office (In extremis contact BT CEO Ian Livingston at ian.livingston@bt.com). I don't believe it would have been sorted out, as it hadn't been in the course of Openreach engineers visits over the preceeding two years, if Openreach had been left to their own devices.

Now here's the rub. While all this was going on, the only other neighbour (a Virgin Broadband customer) connected to the same drop pole, had lost their broadband connection at exactly the same time, but their phone was fine. They were in the throes of trying to get this sorted out via the Virgin helpdesk and, fairly predictably, getting nowhere fast. None of the usual self-help measures (filters, restarts, etc) had worked.

However, once the dropwire problem to the first customer had been fixed, replacement of the broadband filters and restarting the second villager's router got the broadband connection back again.

This raises a rather worrying possibility and one I've not seen mentioned anywhere previously. It looks as though a phone/broadband fault on one telephone line could cause a broadband fault in other lines connected to the same drop pole. If the person affected doesn't have broadband and hasn't noticed noises on their phone line, or has and just ignores them, then finding the fault may prove a little difficult.

The big lessons here are to go and talk to the neighbours if you have a phone or broadband fault and try to get the fault escalated by your ISP/BT if you don't seem to be getting anywhere - but read this advice first.