I was so much Older Then....

[peterbirks]

And, yes, we are back online. And where was the fault? You know, that fault that was part of "your line has been tested and is working okay" fault?

Yes, you've guessed it. It was at the Exchange.

The BT guy arrived (hooray!) and was, of course, pleasant enough. He checked my line and said that the "oscillator" was pinging out about 1.2km, well within the range of my Exchange. So, off he tootled to Lee High Road, and fixed the problem. Then he came back, reconnected everything, and broadband works fine.

He tried to explain to me how broadband lines can cause BT's automatic testing equipment to give a faulty diagnosis, but, whatever the cause, it sounds like a crap testing system, particularly since broadband penetration is now reaching a very high level.

He also mentioned to me a case of a woman who had got the BT Hub system and, from the way the guy described it (the line was fine, her computer was fine, but she couldn't get online) it was clear that the hardware was faulty. so he couldn't do anything for the poor woman. Moral, steer clear of "Home Hub", at least in the short term.

Oh, and you pricks at the Indian end of the BT call centre. "I WAS RIGHT. YOU WERE WRONG."

Oh yes, here's that snippet of conversation that occurred as I neared the end of my tether, at the end of many minutes of frustration as I tried to get them to accept that my line was faulty:

"Look, I've had a broadband connection for eight years. I understand how broadband and routers and computers work. How long have you been working for BT?"

"Twenty years."

"There, you're lying AGAIN! There's no way you have worked for BT for 20 years, and how do I know that? Because BT hasn't EXISTED for 20 years" (OK, I know I'm kind of stretching the truth here, but you know and I know that BT hasn't had a call centre in India for 20 years).

"I did not say 20 years. I said one year. I have been working for BT for one year."

"You did say 20 years. I heard you. Now I've caught you out in a lie and you are denying what you said".

"I could not have said that I have been working with BT for 20 years, because I am only 27."

"How do I know how old you are? You could be 57 as far as I know."

"No, I am 27, so I could not have said that I have been working for BT for 20 years."

"But you might be lying about how old you are as well."

"No, I am 27. So I could not have said that I have been working for BT as long as 20 years."

Well, you can't compete with logic like that, can you?




+++++

One thing that I forgot to mention about Cathay Pacific is that their headphone sockets are "large size" (as opposed to Virgin and all the other airlines I recall flying on, where the sockets are small-size, i.e., the right size for most headphones). So, if you are flying Cathay Pacific and plan to use your own headphones, take an adaptor.

+++++

Some time in the next 24 hours I'll get round to uploading some more pictures and editing the ones that are up via BTYahoo into ones via Photobucket.

+++++

Despite some sturdy cleaning and tidying in the office, I keep finding new dirty bits. I hadn't realized, for example, how dirty the skirting boards (US = "baseboards") were. More work for the all-purpose cleaner. Oh, and the curtain rail, and the windows. And, now I look at it, the curtains could do with a trip to the dry-cleaners, and the shelving is definitely getting dusty.... Sigh.


On the plus side, progress is being made with Tom Waits piano piece. Albeit v. slowly.

Now, I calculate that, at the current rate at which house prices are increasing, that if I want to make an uneconomic move and buy downstairs, I really ought to do something useful with my poker time and win $500K or thereabouts in the next six months. Shouldn't be a problem....

And still no response from the Sofitel Plaza. I wonder if I can claim on my travel insurance for a shoe left in a hotel room?

Comments

Dong!

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Well, that's probably the sound that a BT Engineer's "Oscillator" makes when it's applied to a broadband line.

What the hell is he talking about? I've worked for Fujitsu (ne BT Fibre-optics, or something like that, before they were spun out), and I've never heard of such a thing. Of course, we worked from the exchange out, rather from the home in, but I have a hard time trying to understand what use oscillation of any kind might be.

Look. It's straightforward. There is NO difference between an ADSL connection to the exchange and a standard phone line. Both work on twisted-pair copper wire. NO difference. Honestly. (Well, sometimes you get wacky connections featuring aluminium wire, but I'd blame that on Nicolai Tesla or someone.)

The difference between a standard phone connection and a broadband connection is entirely to do with the dooberry to which the twisted pair is connected at the exchange. There are certain technical "what-ifs" to do with repeater sub-exchanges in-between, but you measure these via standard impedance and capacitance tools.

Oscillation? Couldn't the guy have come up with a pentasyllabic equivalent?

Sounds to me like you're about to be royally screwed. Now that local loop unbundling is pretty much universal, I would give up on BT if I were you and shop for a decent service as an alternative. All they're going to have to do is to disconnect the twisted pair at the exchange end and to plug it in to their own DSLAM at the same exchange and presumably on their own back-haul to the internet (I'm not so sure about this, because I didn't deal with core networks. Talk to an ex-Marconi guy about that). BT will whinge about it, but OfTel are pretty firm about them toeing the line.

As for the shoe, I'm sure you've read about the Washington judge who is/was suing a Korean dry-cleaner because they lost his favourite pair of trousers on his first day at court. $63 million damages sounds quite reasonable to me. I particularly liked the fact that he doesn't have a car, so he would need to rent one every week for ten years ... ummm, beam me up, Scotty ... and the apparent mental anguish that losing the pair of trousers caused him. Fuck me, my mother died six months ago. I can't just go into Macey's and buy another one.

A good, well-loved, nay cherished Churches' shoe should be worth at least fifty million dong.

Was it the left one or the right one? We need to get down to the nut on this one. I have the statistics and I've read up on the legal precedents here. You may need to take some psychiatric tests, but don't worry: I'm a doctor. I can prescribe the necessary drugs. Everything will be fine, just fine ... and I know just the judge in Virginia.

A little matter of change of jurisdiction, but right will prevail.

Unless it was the left shoe. In which case, left will prevail. And if you happen to have three feet, like Rolf Harris, then we can create our own precedent...

Re: Dong!

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Well, you can't expect me to use correct technical terms.

Look, it worked like this. BT ran automated test. Tells me that fault is either in or near to my home.

Engineer tells me that they push out some kind of pulse (which I assume is the equivalent of an Internet Protocol "Ping" to see how far the connection goes before it fails. If they get a 0%, then it's at the exchange. If they get 50%, it's at the CAB box (probably) and if they get 100%, it's pretty close to the hardware in the house (and might actually be the hardware -- which, if it's non-BT, means they can charge you bundles of dosh).

So, this automated test came out at 100%. After I'd spoken to the first guy on Monday (someone in the UK), and played with alternative phones, etc, he accepted that it might be a line fault near the house. So, the booking was made.

Now, when engineer finally arrives, he kind of does the reverse of what the automated test does, in that he starts from my line and "pings" outwards.

This also came up with the equivalent of 100% -- i.e., stating that the fault was at the exchange (because 0% would be my home, 50% would be the CAB, 100% would be the exchange).

So, the automated test from the exchange claimed that the fault was here, while the test from here claimed that the fault was the exchange. How could this be?

It was here that the engineer kind of blinded me with science by saying that the presence of a broadband connection alongside the landline can cause this problem. I don't know how, or why, but that was what he said. I'll let you figure out the technicalities of it. But he did accept that it was a fairly poor test if it only worked with non-broadband connections.

++++

And i got an e-mail back from Vietnam. Yes, they have the shoe. A single (right) Church's shoe will, I hope, be posted half way round the world to be reunited with its partner, and, more importantly, with its owner.

PJ

Ding!

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Well, let me just state first off that I am not in any way qualified to talk authoritatively about the physical characteristics of a telephone line -- I just parrot what other people tell me. I like doing this. It brings back happy memories of being a Historian.

However, and assuming that neither BT Engineer is lying, and that both BT Engineers are performing the same test in the same way (but in opposite directions), then I can only see one possible area that makes sense. (And yes, I do actually know about this area, because I implemented the data capture bit for Fujitsu Telecoms.)

Pretty much all broadband connections run on ADSL, or asynchcronous digital service line. (As I'm sure you know.) The reason that ADSL can offer throughput of up to four hundred times that of a 56K modem is, basically, that a modem only uses that bit of the copper that is otherwise used for voice. It turns out that this is a very small portion of the available bandwidth on a twisted pair, or at least that the bandwidth requirements of voice are low (I believe they are legally defined to be "that consistent with the clear transmission of the speech of a middle-aged man with a Scottish accent." Wonder why that would be?) and can be satisfied cheaply by plonking "voice" in the fat bit of the bell curve.

ADSL uses all the other frequencies, which is why you can run voice and data through the same wire. In fact, it boxes these frequencies up into 256 little segments for better transmission management. (512 for ADSL2.)

Now, here's the bit that I think may be causing the misdiagnosis. ADSL frequencies are split between "upstream" (to the exchange) and "downstream" (to the user). This split isn't random; 32 contiguous segments are used for upstream, and the other 224 for downstream. Unfortunately, and this is quite often the result of equipment provisioning (ie setup) at both ends, some of these segments are, to all intents and purposes, dead. I suspect that dead segments do not produce an echo when terminated at a physical device (DSL modem or DSLAM port).

If the test pulse is sent on a dead frequency, then of course you'll get a reading of 100%. If the frequency segment used in one direction is dead, and the line is actually dead in the opposite direction, then, ding! We see what we see.

Why don't they just use the voice frequencies? Probably so that they can run the test unobtrusively, while the customer -- A Very Important Businessman -- can still use the phone. Pre-ADSL, the other frequencies were available for any purpose whatsoever, including testing.

This is SOP for BT. They lumber around, not realising that the old test equipment is no longer adequate, that everyone has cell-phones now and so don't need constant landline access, and that they're pissing off the customer. Well, actually, they do realise that last one. Pace Thatcher, however, the "competition" aspect of "privatisation" has never really fired up the imaginations of BT management.

Well, anyway, I'm just guessing here. I really can't think of any other scenario to explain the gnomic utterance of the BT Engineer.

I do, however, think that it's worth exploring alternative service providers, even using the same copper. Local loop unbundling means that broadband providers now connect you to their own DSLAM (housed in the exchange) and provide their own engineers and, presumably, their own -- up-to-date, by definition -- test equipment. The only point at which BT is involved comes when they unscrew your copper from the BT connection at the exchange and move it to one that, ahem, works.

Dang!

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

Forgot the Important Caveat: none of the above is relevant if you switched off the DSL modem before the test. I surmise that the line would still be earthed at your end, and that therefore it would be in a "floating" state rather than being held down at the testing frequency. Or, to put it more intuitively, if you switch off the DSL modem, then all you've got is a POTS connection, dontcha? So the crappy old BT testing equipment should be able to measure attenuation via echo just as per any other voice line.

Ah yes, the My Lai solution to ADSL troubleshooting. "We had to kill the connection in order to preserve it for communications..."

I'd still switch from BT, though.

Just be thankful that BT haven't outsourced field engineering to India, because that's what they've done to absolutely every other bit of their technical operations. I can picture it now. "Yes Sir, indeed Sir, I have measured attenuation from Bangalore, and it reads 100% at both ends. Of course, Bangalore is 8000 miles away, and ADSL only reaches for 4 miles, so I always get that measurement. Have you seen Episode 4 of Series 3 of Friends, Sir? Could you explain to me why Miss Katherine Turner is wearing a dress when she is supposed to be an actress playing at being a man? This is a huge cultural difference that I am having confusion over..."

Now, if you'll excuse me, it is a bright and sunny Sunday and I must be off to find all the bits in my program that use binary data taken from a big-endian machine, compressed, carried over to my little-endian machine and decompressed. Then I have to convert them back again.

This is so much more appealing than wandering around talking to gorgeous, smiling, Swedish blondes.

[ribmeister.livejournal.com]

Damn those Indians, if only they didn't make such tasty food!!!! amirite? :)