Are you the only one out of step?

I must admit that I was 'a bit slow off the mark' back in May when I began to experience a series of broadband disconnections.

Because I have been generally happy with my broadband supplier (Plusnet) for several years, I was happy to report the problem and to let them get on with finding a solution.

Consequently, they ran various tests over several days and found no fault at all with any part of the system though they did discover that the problem had actually been occurring for some weeks—as my router, unlike some, spontaneously recovers from disconnections, I hadn't really noticed this until the service seriously deteriorated.

At this point, there was a heavy suggestion that the fault must be with my equipment or the telephone wiring and that a visit from BT would result in a large fee if this were found to be the case—since the BT engineering side became Openreach, the threat of swingeing fees seems to be a standard response to any fault report.

As the telephone line was working perfectly and I had already swapped the router and microfilter, I was not overly enthusiastic about a BT visit.

However, a BT engineer telephoned 'out of the blue' and happened to mention, in passing, that the telephone exchange was in the process being moved from Moorgate to Queen Victoria Street—other destinations, mentioned over several subsequent conversations, included Blackfriars and Farringdon.

Various engineers phoned or turned-up unannounced over the next few days with one offering the opinion that it would not be possible to get a broadband speed in excess of 1 mbps due to the routing of the service around 3 exchanges—the service provides, theoretically, up to 8 mbps though actual speed depends on line quality and distance from the exchange.

At this point, I was either using dial-up or getting about 128 kbps on broadband which is not much faster.

A quick check of the local community 'forum' revealed that a large number of local people were suffering the same problem, irrespective of the Internet Service Provider being used.

I also ran into my next door neighbour, an AOL user, who had endured several long 'try this and try that' sessions with the company's Indian call centre—he was quite surprised to hear that the most effective action was to 'do nothing' as the real cause of the problem was now becoming obvious, at least to the customers.

Happily, the broadband connection had now stabilised and I have been enjoying consistent speeds of about 5000-6500 mbps for a couple of months.

In my opinion, the lessons to be drawn here are:

1. Internet Service and Software Provider help-desks can be quite good at answering basic "how do I" queries but often have limited capacity or inclination to investigate issues with their own products.
   
   Often, they will work through the 'try this and try that' script until they reach the point of handing the problem back to you—'owning' the problem through to a solution is unusual.   
    
2. Whatever your problem, it is worth doing a few internet searches to see if anybody else has come up with a solution—this can save hours of 'trying this and trying that' which can itself generate more problems down-the-line.       

In this case, I could have saved myself a few days of argee-bargee if I had looked around, at an earlier stage, to see if others were suffering the same problem.