Whoopee-do

Another time in the days of 5.25″ floppy disks, my friend got called out to fix a 5.25″ floppy drive. Yes they used to fix them because they were so expensive. Anyway, he removed the top from the drive and the read head and mechanics where covered in a very sticky red substance. He could not successfully clean the drive so had to write it off, explaining to the customer that he could not determine what the substance was or where it had come from. He said to the customer that they would need to purchase a replacement at considerable cost.

As he was leaving, a lady asked him if he could look at here floppy drive as it was getting very slow and unreliable. There was a disk in the drive so he removed it and noticed that in the little window where the disks magnetic media is exposed (So data can be read from and written to the Disk) there appeared to be the same substance that he had found in the other drive smeared across the surface.

He decided that the only way he would find out what it was, was to taste it. Well he thought, since when have they started lubricating floppy drives with strawberry jam, yep strawberry jam.

He stood up and announced to the office the cause of the failures and a women standing across from him went bright red and decided that maybe she should come clean.

A few days earlier they were celebrating one of the staffs birthdays and that person had bought in the obligatory cakes for everyone in the office. This lady returned to her desk to eat her jam doughnut. As she bit into it, the jam decided to exit the doughnut in one gloop, so rather than get it on her dress, grabbed the first thing she could find which happened to be a 5.25″ floppy disk. She saved her dress and caught the gloop on the disk. Now rather than land on the outer sleeve, the jam hit the little window I mentioned above and realising her mistake decided to hide the evidence by manually turning the disk inside the sleeve. She wiped the remainder of the jam from the sleeve and put the disk back on her desk.

Now these disks contained various office files and eventually this disk was used on some of the office PC’s with the resulting jammy gloop on the disk surface being transferred to the innards of the disk drive.

That little exercise cost her company quite a few hundred quid rather than a few quid to have her dress cleaned.

Many years ago a friend of mine worked for a company that supplied software (as did many others) on this fantastic media of the day called the floppy disk.

For your information, these discs came in various formats:-

Single sided 8 sector a whopping 160kb capacity

Single sided 9 sector with a massive 180kb capacity

Double sided capable of storing 360kb and finally HD or High Density with a super duper capacity of 1.2mb.

Well my last few posts probably sum up my frustration in dealing with BT, no matter how large or small the project they just seem able to screw it up in one way or another.

Sadly we have little or no choice when it comes to telephone services over copper unless you are lucky enough to live in a cabled area with services provided by the trains planes and space ship people, but they too could do with a few lessons in customer support.

A number of years ago a customer decided to upgrade their broadband connection because the business used new technology that required a number of office workers to have a reliable fast internet connection.

It was at this time they decided to go with  a bonded broadband solution purely on the grounds of cost as fibre was and still is extremely expensive. Also this solution provided some failover as the system would still operate even with three of the fours lines down.

We placed the order and BT tell us we can expect speeds of up to 4mb on each of the 4 lines giving a potential bandwidth of 16mb. Now I  know this was unlikely, but hey ho lets see what happens.

BT arrive on site and install the four lines, the Cisco router with 4 ADSL WICS is supplied and connected, but you’ve guessed it the speed was appalling.

I monitor the speeds over a period of weeks and one line is particularly poor. It regularly sync’d between 800kbps and 1.5mbps. The other three hover around 3.5 to 4.5mbps.

Now for those that may not understand the bonding technology, this means that all lines must effectively sync at the lowest common denominator, so we now have 4 x 800kbps at its worst. So we have a 2 grand Cisco router 4 brand new ADSL lines and speed equal to about 3.2mbps. Wow the excitement.

I call the service provider and explain the situation. OK they say (To be honest they have been very helpful so my gripe it not with them), maybe there is excessive noise on the internal cabling. The ADSL lines where about 50 metres from the DP.

We agree to move the ADSL sockets downstairs right next to the DP thus removing the cable factor. Back come BT and duly oblige by moving the lines as discussed. Guess what, it did not make a blind bit of difference.

So now on a bad day by removing the slowest line from the bonding I can actually get a better average speed across the connection as the slowest speed is higher.

It never ceases to amaze me that in this day and age, BT are totally incapable of providing rock steady fast links running at the same speed, fed from the same street box to the same exchange. Why are we still having to put up with third world speeds and quality of service in this country.

One of my customers had an 2Meg Kilostream link connecting two sites. This account is managed by one of the many companies BT use to handle their smaller businesses or basically those that BT are not interested in.

Anyway I have a meeting with these guys to confirm support contacts on the hardware etc and they then admit to me that they have not got a clue how to support the equipment and have no knowledge of the routers on the link. (The customer had been paying them support for around 6 years). It turns out that when they received the order for the link they subcontracted the work to another company (unbeknown to the customer).

Sometime in the past this company managing our account decides they know longer wish to use this other company but fail to ask for any details of previous contracts they had installed on their behalf. Now thats clever.

So we decide that perhaps now would be a good time to get the service upgraded and go for a nice 10mb fibre link which will make the remote site an extension of the main network and give us lots more fexibility. So the wheels are set in motion and we are told it should be about 4 weeks to get the service installed.

A surveyor from BT duly arrives and conducts his survey at both sites, declaring that all is good and that the ducts are in place for the cable runs. By the way he didn’t lift one manhole cover to inspect the ducts, I have no reason to question his wisdom. Excellent I say.

About a week later I get a call from the BT planning office to say that BT will be on site in a few days to install the fibre. Wow I thought things are moving a pace.

Damn I should not have said that, BT arrive on site install the internal fibre but cannot connect the external runs because there is no duct present to carry the fibre cable. They will have to arrange for the civils team to install a new duct to the road. A distance of about 100 metres.

Now this customer already had fibre at the premises, but for some reason BT could not find the existing route in so a few days later a team of road diggers turn up and start carving a slice out of the office car park. They install the duct to an existing manhole and a nice little pipe poking out of the ground near the foundations ready to take the new cable.

Back come the BT installers and find that the new little pipe is totally in the wrong position and would not allow for the bend radii of the fibre cable so was of no use. Back come the civils team and relocate the pipe to a new position marked by the BT guys on the previous visit.

So now we are ready. Back come the BT guys and start to terminate the cables. They walk out the the ducting in the road in the estate lift the cover and guess what, the civils guys had left a coil of fibre in the manhole. Apparently they could not route the cable across the road because the duct was full. They had not notified anyone. Sorry say the BT guys but we cannot complete the work until a new duct is installed across the road on the estate. A week later another civils team roll up and install the new ducting so that the fibre can cross the road and begin its journey to the exchange.

In the meantime I get a call from the customer to say their downstairs toilets are backed up and overflowing. (You would not believe the things I do in IT support).

So what happened then. It turns out that the first teams of civils guys had, during the rush to complete the job, crushed the main sewer pipe leading from the downstairs toilets when backing filling the hole for the new duct, thus causing the problem, lovely.

We call out an emergency repair team and good on them they work well into the evening and sort out the issue. We have some nice photos of the underground pipe investigation.

OK, back to the fibre install. We now move on to the other site and yep you guessed it the ducts were full. Thankfully the BT guys could reroute fairly easily, but they had only allowed for running the cable 10 metres to the duct, not the 80 metres they ended up running the cable.

Eventually all was good, the fibre was in the connection made. Our 4 weeks had turned into nearly 10.

It is a wonder I have any hair left.

One of my customers was moving offices and requested a new line to be installed at the new premises.

I spoke to BT and placed an order for the installation of ISDN2 and an analog line for broadband and fax.

I stated that under no circumstances was the old line to be disconnected until the customer has moved into the new office, we would then like a forwarder on the old number to the new number. All this was confirmed by BT in writing. Unfortunately the customer was moving to a new exchange so could not take their number with them.

I arranged to meet BT on site and all goes smoothly and the BT guys where very helpful and routed some cables in trunking. I thank them and leave.

Back in the office I get a frantic phone call from the customer to say all their phones are dead and they cannot make or receive calls. I immediately rang BT and explained the situation.

They then admitted that they had made a serious mistake and had terminated the line too early. Oh well never mind I say, can you reinstate the line for the next few weeks until the move is over.

BT’s response sorry no can do, the number is now not available and it is impossible to reinstate the line. So I now have a customer that provides 24 hours services without a phone system.

I then spend the next day trying to get BT to solve the problem by forwarding calls to mobiles and a fax line so calls can be made, but of coarse the phone number no longer exists and they were adamant that there was nothing to be done.

So with a sharp intake of breath they get by. Its a struggle but they manage.

Then 2 days before they are due to move they get a phone call from BT to say they are pleased to say they have reinstated the phone number and all is working. How come not 10 days earlier they were adamant that it could not be done.

You just cannot make it up with these large companies. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.

A few years ago a customer of mine had a limited internet connection with their service provider. Lets call them the little devil. The customer was on a home account rather than a business account and asked me to speak to the provider to get a better deal. This I did and was was offered speeds of up to 20MB up from 8MB and unlimited downloads, great I say, lets go with that. I was promised that a new router would arrive and that I was to replace the existing router with the new one so that everything would sync correctly??. We could expect delivery within 2 to 3 working days. Great, I told the manager that everything was in hand, the new router would arrive by the end of the week and the switchover would happen soon afterwards.

Well here is where the fun starts.

No router arrives, so I pick up the phone and speak to customer services again, I explain the situation and guess what, there is no record of my conversation with them about the new connection nothing zip zero, so I go through the whole sordid detail again, and again I am promised the new speeds and that a new router will be delivered within a few days.

Guess what, no router. I give them the benefit of the doubt and wait another week just in case it is “lost in the post”, but no router arrives.

I ring again and I am politley told that there is not enough capacity on the exchange for the new service to be activated so bad luck and they hadn’t even bothered to tell us.

Now not being one to accept things lying down, I questioned them again over this and they told me that they would look into it in more detail, great I said, and hung up. Strangely, the new router arrived the following day, so I took a gamble and installed it. No change in speed.

I ring the provider back and explain that they had sent the new router out after all and that maybe the problem they had was now fixed, but I was not getting the promised 13MB download speed. We will do a line check they say. Good I say.

Now the support guy comes on the line and says that they cannot run a line test as the line is not terminated, thats strange I say, you have been providing broadband on this line for seven years. He is insistant that they cannot proceed until the line is terminated correctly and he arranged for a visit from Mr BT to sort out the problem.

Mr BT engineer arrives and terminates the line saying that he cannot believe any services worked on the line without it. Never mind I say, at least we have made progress.

How wrong I was, after another call to the service provider, and another line test, the support guys says, sorry we cannot complete the test, the line is not terminated correctly, oh yes it is I say, your Mr BT engineer was here earlier and he fitted an LTE on the line and his tests say it is OK, right says Mr support guy we must have another problem.

So we are now 10 weeks, yes 10 weeks down the line from my first conversion with the little devil and finally we get the line switched over and working, it was not a fault at the customers but a fault at the exchange, fantastic, I log into the router and yes we have around 10MB, not as good as the 13MB promised but I’m not going to argue.

Anyway all is good for 2 weeks then nothing, it stopped working for no apparent reason. Now this customer is totally reliant on their broadband for a number of services including credit card payments, they are not happy.

Yet another call to the service provider and tell them that the service is down, no problem they say we will run a line check. Back comes the support guy, sorry the line check has failed we cannot determine if any hardware is on the line, can you make sure the router is connected and turned on. Well of coarse it was, why would I remove it but nope they still can’t get a good line test they will have to get back to me. Over a 2 week period I must have spoken to these people more than a dozen times and each time they still had not resolved the problem, 2 weeks without broadband for a large organisation and I’m feeling the heat. One option they offered was to cancel the account and start again. My reply was somewhat terse and he understood when I asked if it was going to take 10 weeks again to get the service back online.

One day, about day 15 of this whole debacle without an internet connection, the service comes back online, just like that, no calls, no visits nothing, it just comes back online. That very same day the service manager of the company happens to bump into the BT engineer that was on site a number of weeks earlier installing the LTE. Hey he said do you know anything about our service being restored today we have been trying for 2 weeks to get this resolved. Guess what Mr BT engineer said, he had just come from the exchange and found that our circuit had been disconnected and he had just plugged the cable back in (his words).

Fantastic, finally it was working again so I logged into the router and guess what, we were back on the old 8Meg circuit with the same slow speed as before.

So in all this little excercise took around 13 weeks to move from 8meg to 20meg to 8meg. The company changed supplier after that one.

So, I get a phone call from a home worker that her broadband is down. Internet Explorer is showing its usual unhelpful error message. She asks if I can login and sort it out. Once I have explained that I will need a working broadband at her end to be able to login, I suggest she speak to her service provider. I won’t mention any names but they have planes and balloons and space ships.

So the support guy says they have done the checks and the broadband line is good, it must be your router. The lady calls me back and tells me the good news, so can you access my router now as they say the line is good and it should be working. No I say, I still need your router connected to the internet, you need to speak to them and get them to confirm your username and password as something appears to have gone wrong with the connection.

She speaks to support again and they suggest she resets her router and re enters the account details, so thats what she did, she reset the router as requested, then asks the support guy, ok, now how do I re enter my details into the router, sorry madam came the reply, because we did not supply that router I cannot help you.

So there you go, the support guy gets her to reset the router and walks away, brilliant. Now back on the phone she is stuck. So what next you may ask.

Well she has a very understanding neighbour who allows her to use his broadband connection if her’s is down, so I suggest she uses that so I can get access to her laptop. Using a bit of remote access software I am able to access her machine, I ask her to connect her router to the laptop as well, via an ethernet cable, is it the blue one she asked!. I am 70 miles away from the cable in question, just in case you the reader hadn’t realised.

I gain access to the router enter her username and password as confirmed by the provider, although they did not confirm the case of the password, so had a bit of trial and error, but still no luck, then I check the ADSL VPI/VCI settings and they are incorrect. I change the values and boom we are connected to the internet.

Scripted broadband support is appalling, any deviation from their standard and they are stuck, and asking someone to reset their router without then staying around to help reconfigure it is a joke. Sometimes I just have to laugh otherwise I would go mad.