Demon BT problems - here we go again

3 months on from a 2 week outage on 1 of my broadband accounts, now both have fallen over and what's the best advice anyone cane give me? "Call back tomorrow".

[ Mar 02 2007, 10:17 ]

February 27 - Wot! No connection?

On Tuesday morning I arrived at my office a little after 9.am as usual and soon noticed that I had no broadband connection. I checked the modem/router and dicovered that the problem seemed to be 'out there' so called Demon's support call-centre, (as they are my ISP).

Of course, having been off-line at home for over 2 weeks in November '06 I was anxious to get things moving quickly and to try to avoid the 'Check your micro-filter and call back tommorrow' loop.

I called home and heard that the connection there was off too. Aha! 2 Demon/BT accounts off-line at the same time at locations about a mile apart should automatically rule out the likelihood of the problem being at my end(s).

I did manage to get Demon's tech support person to accept it was a BT issue relatively quickly, in fact about a week faster than last time so I was remaining optimistic. However, I was categorically told that if Demon logged the fault with BT at that point BT would reject it as it was less than 8 hours old. The spin was that this delay was to determine whether the fault was continuous or intermittent bt I don't buy that - with 2 accounts off-line at 2 places you dn't need 8 hours to work out that the problem is most likely to be at the local telephone exchange.

This 8 hour or 1 business day buffer is part of BT's Service Level Agrreement, (SLA), with Demon and is apparently the same wiht all ISPs, (please correct me if I'm wrong). So, as Demon couldn't tell BT something was wrong I thought I would and I called 150.

It's at times like these that you really start to appreciate how much work large companies like BT put into developing systems to frustrate your efforts to talk to anyone with the knowledge or authority to actually do anything for you. The closest I got was talking to a BT business customer services rep who seemed to be genuinely trying to think of something that could be done - but couldn't, and if he couldn't what chance did I have?

BT faults department couldn't help because I could make calls and the line checked out. (At this stage everything points to there being a problem with the specific BT/Demon set-up at the exchange). I was even offered to ahve an engineer visit me but they wouldn't be a broadband expert. Perhaps I should have accepted. Perhaps the engineer would have been able to call his mates at the exchange or go there himself and hit something with a hammer. But, as it was still day 1 and I didn't want to waste time and effort on a seeminging pointless visit, I declined, thinking that someone who was broadband trained would look at the issue soon - someone in the right department would be on the case in the morning when the 8 hour curfew was up. Right?

Yea, right.

It's Friday morning. There have been numerous phone calls. I think I've been speaking to people in Scandanavia as well as India who seem to be closer to the Demon mothership. My fault has been logged with BT but now I'm hearing that in this situation te time-frame for BT to fix the fault is 40 working hours or 1 business week, (give or take a few EU reglations-fulfilling breaks). My business relies on having a connection to the Internet so I'll leave it to your imagination as to how happy I've become to learn that I'm screwed for at least a week.

Meanwhile...

Thankfully I have friendly neighbours in the next office who are letting me use their connection but it is still a problem as I can't be online and communicate with my office server at the same time.

Oddly enough the connection at home came back to life yesterday evening. No vital signs in the office though which seems to counter the hypothesis I've been developing - maybe I should check my micro-filter...