BT Customer Care. NOT!

Seems the fault on my line will not be fixed until at least 3rd May. Apparently they have so many faults in my area that they are unable to get an engineer on to it the next day. IMHO it's crap. On Friday I spent about 2 hours on the phone to BT, trying to speak to a human (press 2 for this automated service, press 3 to get cut off; that sort of thing!) and I got precisely nowhere! Meanwhile I contunue to use dial-up but it's not what I'm paying BT loadsa dosh each month for. The most frustrating thing is the difficulty one has getting through to the correct person at BT. Handy Hint - choose the option for 'I want to leave BT', you get to speak to a human PDQ then!

ADSL again

This evening my ADSL is down. Again. Keeps restarting and dropping again after a few seconds.

Spoke to BT (again). This time they have found a fault with the phone line between us and the exchange. Since I can use voice I hope this means that the line is damaged in some way which makes it unable to sustain a high enough SNR to keep the DSL up. Or something. We shall see whether an engineer fixes it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I have resorted to good ol' dial-up! (In case you were wondering how I could blog this!)

Testing

Went to the F1 test at Silverstone today. A great day, even though Ferrari wasn't there. I took loads of photos and I'll post a few once I've sorted them out.

Green Day!

Greenday voted number 1 in the Kerrang Rock 100 for American Idiot video - yeah!

Well done Ferrari!

Schumi won a great race at Imola for Ferrari. It was a bit close at one stage but he kept Alonso behind him for long enough and Alonso settled for 2nd. You still got too many points, my Spanish friend!

So a great weekend for Schumi, that's his 85th F1 win and 66th F1 pole, beating Senna's total pole score. Next stop Nurburgring on 7th May!

The postman delivers twice

The router promised by BT arrived today. Well actually they sent two for some reason. The only reason I can think of would be that I could daisy chain them, since they are not wireless. The new Netgear router seems to be performing well so for now the BT kit is staying in the box!

2 days to Imola

Just 2 days to the San Marino Grand Prix. The circuit Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari is in the heart of Ferrari country - it's a stone's throw from both Modena and Maranello.

It's your home race Ferrari - the tifosi expects!

Thanks, BT

BT lady rang this morning, only thing was it was mid morning in India and it woke me up! Not impressed. Anyhow, she told me she had tested the DSL line this morning (not the previous day as promised) and pronounced it to be fault-free. Am I surprised? No. Am I happy? Well no, not really.

ADSL Woes

Been having terrible trouble with my ADSL line. Over the last couple of days its kept dropping, getting disconnects sometimes after a few minutes or sometimes after an hour. Numerous phone calls to BT, they said my line was OK and it must be the microfilters. Tried 4 filters, no change. BT said it must be the router and will send me a new one but not until next week!

So being the impatient type I bought a new Netgear DG834G - actually not that expensive - but the line still dropped. So, back on to BT, spoke to Tech Support in India and they promised to test the line and ring me back after about 30 minutes. Well that was 9 hours ago and no-one has rung back yet! Having said that (and I'm tempting fate here) the line has been up ever since, so maybe they did something.

I've been looking at several support sites and I've come to the conclusion that the problem is to do with the Signal to Noise Ratio, apparently if the SNR margin is too low the modem won't keep the DSL connection. At the moment my downstream SNR Margin is 27db - it's a pity I didn't know what it was when the line was dropping but when the line is down you can't tell.

So I'm monitoring the connection. Apart from chasing BT, I also have some tricks to try, for instance to boost the SNR I can "rewire" my phone socket to disconnect the ringer wire. I'll post any news here. Meanwhile, if you are interested visit
www.adslguide.org it's a good starting point.

Guitar Hero!

I got Guitar Hero today - we've been playing it all day. Awesome, Dude!

If you have no idea what I am on about click here .

Dancing Pipe Cleaner Man!

Hours of simple fun with Dancing Pipe Cleaner Man

Gone commercial!

The iWorld web site has instigated an affiliates programme - if I have a link to their site on mine they will pay me in vouchers. I've published the links, so let's see if they deliver! (iWorld specialise in accessories for iPods).

I've also published some additional information on my technical page about networking Mac printers so that they can be used by Windows PCs on the same network. See my web site for these.