Internet Outage

Aaaargh! No Internet. Broadband was working but the router wasn't transmitting a wireless signal. Fantastic service from the BT Broadband Support line. One phone call, and a very polite and helpful help desk engineer diagnosed (i.e. confirmed that the router wasn't transmitting wireless) and resolved the problem (with a soft reset) in about 50 minutes.

I'm not the only person with connectivity problems...

I picked this little gem up from a tweet by cha0tic

No Twitter for Hitler


There's loads of different interpretations of the same scene on YouTube
including
Hitler is invaded by Mexicans
Hitler gets banned from World of Warcraft
Somebody Stole Hitlers Car
etc.

Disconnected (2)

I spoke to soon in my Disconnected post - the broadband connection went down the day after, just after midday.

Back on the phone to Orange, back to India Technical Support, back through the "diagnostics" umpteen times again. They told me to wait for the replacement router that was in it's way, and the callback that was due on Tuesday 13th at 7pm.

8pm on Tuesday 13th. No replacement router and No callback! Back on the phone to Orange, back to India Technical Support who passed the buck to Customer Services. Customer Services, who also sounded like they might be in India, told me that there didn't appear to be an order for a router. They passed me to the escalation team.

The chap on the escalation team sounded very sheepish when I asked him why there had been no callback at 7pm. He told me that not only had the callback been missed, but they hadn't ordered the replacement router! (What a bunch of numpties?) He said that he'd immediately ordered the router, which should arrive on Friday.

Thursday morning and the new router arrived. Tried it out on Thursday night, and as I suspected no connection. Back on the phone to Orange, back to India Technical Support - ran through the usual diagnostics. Tried to pass me back to the escalation team, who tried to fob me off as a courtesy callback was due on 19th Jan. I demanded to speak to them so I was put through. The lady who answered told me that all diagnostics had been done, so she couldn't help and that I should await the callback on the 19th Jan. I demanded an earlier callback, so the best she could do was 09:30 on 17th Jan.

09:30 am today and I found myself speaking to the chap who had forgotten to call on Tuesday. He said that he would now ask BT to investigate and arranged a follow up callback on Monday 19th to let me know what they had found out.

10:45 am and we noticed the internet connection come back online for a minute or so. Looks like somebody is doing some testing on the network.

13:00 and we're back online, and have been so since then.

Why oh why oh why can't the numpties at Orange involve BT at an earlier stage? I explained to them the history of this case. They should have been able to see for themselves that we'd had a similar situation in May last year, where the Orange customer equipment and connection diagnostics all check out OK, but the BT line tests show "no fault".
They seem to have a reluctance to escalate to BT. It should not take 15 days to get to this stage.

I'm going to wait for their callback on the 19th and ask for an explanation as to what BT said the problem was. My own suspicion is that maintenance work in the exchange around Bank Holidays causes a configuration change that affects our service. There's probably a special set up for our line, or for Orange customers (and I bet that there's not many left in Liverpool) that they keep resetting and forgetting to reconfigure.

I'd like to know as I believe the root cause lies with BT. This is compounded by Orange's inability to quickly establish that the fault is not with the customer's setup or equipment, and not with them.

Then I'll be calling Orange Customer Services and asking for my MAC code.

Originally we used Demon, but when free dial up access became available, we opted for Freeserve. Freeserve were OK and then were taken over by Wanadoo who gave us our first taste of broadband. We had no problems with Wanadoo. Our experience of the service has gone downhill since Orange took over.

We're now both suffering from online access withdrawal and need a heavy fix of email, web and download time to feel normal again :) It's actually a little scary - you don't realise how much you depend on something like the internet access from home, until it's not there. The local library and work is no substitute.

Disconnected

I've only just got the internet connection back after a 6 day outage.

This time it took me 5 days to exhaust all of the possibilities for a fault at my end with the Indian call centre before I finally persuaded them to pass the case onto the "Escalation Team" i.e. the technical staff in the UK.

Went through a set of diagnostics, and a couple of router reboots, with a helpful chap last night, who then told me that someone would call this morning. At 11 am today a pleasant lady informed me that the technicians could not identify the fault, as the line test showed 'no fault' (as it has done on other occasions) and could only conclude that my router might be faulty. They have despatched a replacement router to me.

Just after this phone call I thought that I'd give my current router one last reboot - and it connected! Hmmmm.

I immediately rang the call centre and got them to update the case with this information.

So either the router has an intermittent fault, or (as I strongly suspect) it's a case of good old Orange or BT not admitting that they've screwed up something on the network again, and have quietly corrected it. It's notable that I seem to get these issues around, or just after a Bank Holiday.

My 12 month contract with Orange is now up, so I think that it's time to switch broadband suppliers. Might not make any difference if it's BT who's causing this, but at least I might get the same amount of frustration for a cheaper price :)

Indiana Jones and the Lost Broadband Connection II

I've sent off a four page letter of complaint to Orange after being back online for 10 days, followed by another outage of 5 days before coming back online again, but at a much reduced download speed.

I've got a 12.5 hour or so release to do at work on Saturday afternoon/evening/Sunday morning. I reckon that I might find the time to do a "catch up" blog post on Sunday night - assuming that our internet connection stays for that long...

Meanwhile we went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at the local fleapit yesterday afternoon.
From what I'd heard from the critics I wasn't expecting to enjoy it as much as I did. Not as good as Raiders, or Last Crusade, but probably better than Temple of Doom.

I know that there's no way the hero should survive most of the things that happen to him in a flick like this, but there was one scene in particular that I thought - absolutely no way!

Harrison Ford plays an ageing, but has-still-got-what-it-takes Indy, although he's got to be the most destructive archaeologist since Auguste Mariette used dynamite to help locate the Apis Bulls.

Back Online

3 Week Outage!

I've lost count of the daily phone calls to Orange with them saying that the line should be OK, but with no internet connection at our end.

Eventually they agreed to send an engineer round to our house. He was due this afternoon. Mysteriously at 6am our internet connection came back!

I called Tech Support around 9am and asked them to update the case with this information. They said that the engineer would call anyway.

I called again at 10am to check that the case had been updated. No it hadn't. The engineer is coming at no charge... I insisted that they still update the case (getting paranoid here, but I didn't trust them not to claim that the chap fixed it our end when he turns up).

The engineer came at 3 or 4pm. He told Novelist Supermum that our setup was perfectly OK and that somebody had definitely fixed something at the exchange - but he wasn't allowed to say who or what.

I'm now too busy composing my letter of complaint to Orange Customer Services to be able to blog further.

Orange Outage

Not much blogging here of late.

Partly due to much family activity going on around the time of Samwise' Birthday - I'll catchup with an update on this at a later date.

Mainly due to having no Broadband at home for over a week!! 4 frustrating calls to a call centre in Mumbai, plus one to BT to confirm that there's nothing wrong with the line, until I finally got an operative that knew what they were talking about.
Basically Orange have been doing some maintenance work, and they've botched the job, resulting in no internet access for us.

I could understand this, but the frustrating thing was the lies that I was given during the first 4 calls. They said they were doing a line check, but in the meantime could I just try resetting my router?
I went through this activity four times. The last operative said that in fact no line check had been made, so the router resets were just a stalling tactic, based on a supposition that most problems are at the user end.

I was told that in fact Orange had carried out maintenance activities at 3 different times over the past week. Looks like they still haven't got it right.
I've got the name of the last operative, who has made a lot of re-assuring noises, and will be calling me back with a status update whilst further maintenance activities are carried out to repair the problem.

(As you might guess I'm not blogging from home right now).

Hopefully we'll be back online soon - although there is a Bank Holiday coming up - what's the bet it won't be resolved until after Monday?

Orange Broadband Outage

I arrived home from work on Friday night to be told by Novelist Supermum that our Internet Connection was not working.

Checked it out and discovered that web browsers weren't loading pages, email was hanging and I could only barely connect to an ftp site - which timed out fairly quickly.

Our PC's (1 Windows and 1 Mac) were connecting OK to our wireless router and the router was connected to the internet.

Pinging a few servers that I often connect to showed me that 50 to 75% of requests were timing out. Looked suspiciously like a network or line problem to me.

Decided to wait until morning, then try again.

Same problem again in the morning so I called Orange Customer Support at 09:45

I got the sort feeling that you get when you hear an alarm clock ringing in the middle of the day - i.e. slight depression on hearing a familiar sound - when I heard an Indian accent on the other end of the phone. I usually find that the language and cultural differences when dealing with Indian Call Centre staff require great patience, and cause a good deal of frustration.

The chap at the other end was very helpful. As I expected he ran me through power cycling the router, resetting the router, checking the configuration, checking the wires, plugging in directly to the network, rather than the wireless connection - all of which I had tried the night before. I stuck with him and tried again.

Finally at 10:15 he came to the conclusion that this was due to a possible network or line problem. He said that he was requesting a line check, which would take about 2 hours. He stressed that I shouldn't call again, and that they would update me by text message with the result of the line check.

Waited for about 4 hours, and no text message. Went to pick the kids up from their Grandmas. Half an hour later at 16:00 a text message comes through saying "Hello, we tried to call you about the fault you registered but couldn't get hold of you. Please call technical support or we'll have to close the fault. Thanks.".

I sent a text back explaining that I was out and didn't have their contact number. I told them that I'd be back in a couple of hours, and asked them to give me time to return home, or text me their phone number.

I got back home and called them again about 17:45. A different Indian chap on the other end again. This one told me that the line check had been done and shown that the line was OK. He made me jump through hoops with the checking and configuration. After half an hour of this he paused for a moment (I think somebody may have been whispering in his ear). He announced that the cause was on Orange server which was down for "maintenance" at 16:30. We both cheered at this point - Hooray!).

He couldn't tell me when the "maintenance" was due to finish. (Bollocks! thinks I. This is not maintenance, this is Fix on Fail!)

I had a minor rant at him, as to why wasn't the network status checked, before he embarked on a reconfiguration of the default settings on my PC. I told him that I expected to be re-imbursed with the price of the second phone call.

He advised me to wait 24 hours before checking the connection. Being impatient I checked at 21:00 and discovered that we were back on line.