75ZT Community

Our BT land line went dead yesterday as I was speaking to a relative who called on a mobile, I assumed that the problem lay with the mobile and that the person would call again later. I forgot about it until curiosity got the better of me before going to bed when I picked up the phone to hear? Zilch!

Our phones are of the plug and socket type and all of them are affected, plugging one directly into the test socket at the master box had no effect. But to my surprise I found that my Talktalk broadband service which uses the same BT land line as our phones is working ok.

I submitted an online report to Talktalk (our phone and broadband provider) and its response was to link me to its official report process...but guess what that process requires before it will allow you to submit it? Yeah, a working phone number to enable updates to be sent. You couldn't make it up, lol.

Yes, I sympathise. I get the same frustrating sort of messages when Virgin Media broadband goes down and I report it by telephone to be told that it is simpler and quicker to login to their website

Well, having explained that I don't have a working phone number which its obstacle course demands before it will allow a fault report to be submitted Talktalk has resorted to referring me to the said obstacle course ad infinitum. My emails are not even being answered, they are just being bounced straight back to me. So, I will have to make a visit to some relatives to use their phone tomorrow but I thank God that I did not renew my annual contract with this outfit before Christmas so I will be booting it asap.

All of the stories I've heard about it have finally caught up with me, ok when things are working but when they are not and you need support you may as well talk to a wall.

I always recommend BT, only for the fact when things do go wrong you can talk to the horse and not the horses arse.

Hmmm....BT.... Our internet disappeared around Midnight Sunday....ophoned them on Monday and they tested it and discovered that 'we are doing a major upgrade on your exchange and it'll be working again by 3pm.....ok so was working from 3.30pm...I can live with that...but the upgrade? Previous speed 6mb+ ...now? 2.4mb.....

Interesting that your fault appeared on Sunday too, Zeb, maybe they were going into the exchanges on a national basis to do the same job. Hmm?

Our phone line is still dead. I complained to ofcom as I thought that it was the regulator but it would seem not, it advised that it can't get involved in individual cases but it may use my report for monitoring purposes. I guess the banks must have had the same sort of stooges presiding over their activities, lol.

When confronted with obstruction and cunning stunts I've found that a bit of circumvention can sometimes pay dividends, with that in mind I dug out a couple of old mobiles and I managed to retrieve an old mobile number from one of them. The number hasn't been used for years so it will have been confiscated and possibly reallocated but it opened the door to Talktalk's tech support for me when I used it to submit my fault report. Yippee!

At long last they are now looking at the problem and the last time I checked they had disabled my broadband speed checker because, guess what? They have found a fault on the line...well I never.

Here in deepest South Cheshire we are so lucky, we now have download speeds of just over 9 Kb/sec...

Update: After 8 days a man from BT Openreach finally arrived and found that our line had somehow become disconnected at a junction box in a nearby street. After fixing that he was not happy with the line quality, crackly he said, so he apparently connected us via a different pair of wires from that junction box to our nearest telegraph pole.

Great to have the phone working again but I can't say that I've noticed any improvement otherwise for the work that was done, my broadband speed is still the same and tends to be rated at up to 3mb on most tests - usually nowhere near that in reality though.