Late yesterday afternoon the BT Openreach engineer arrived to sort out our lack of broadband.<\/p>\n
He was a nice guy, but better than that, he had a lot of technical nous about him.<\/p>\n
I told him that we’d had a year of patchy service from BT Internet and that we hadn’t had broadband service since the line was switched to Plusnet.<\/p>\n
He plugged things in and ran tests.<\/p>\n
Within 20 seconds he said there was no problem here, or on the line, but that there was an issue in the local exchange.<\/p>\n
I may have sighed.<\/p>\n
Because of the past issues, he ran a more detailed series of tests and also a line\/pair test.<\/p>\n
There was nothing up with the line that could explain the trials and tribulations we have experienced with BT Internet.<\/p>\n
But we knew that all along, really, didn’t we?<\/p>\n
He finished his mug of tea and drove to the exchange.<\/p>\n
About 4m 20s later, the router told me that it had sync’d with the local exchange.<\/p>\n
I may have whooped.<\/p>\n
A couple of minutes later we lost the sync, but less than a minute later it came back.<\/p>\n
And then he called me.<\/p>\n
I won’t embarrass anyone, but let’s just say that my experience in the technical world leads me to believe that if you expect things to work, they generally work better if they’re plugged in.<\/p>\n
Yes, that’s right. That’s what the problem was.<\/p>\n