Magic ADSL
Over the past few weeks, for the first time ever, my ADSL connection at home started to play up. Nothing major, the modem would loose synchronisation momentarily (1 or 2 seconds) every few hours and then resync – Windows remained perfectly oblivious to this activity and carried on as if nothing had occured.
Past experience with my connection had been faultless; at one point I was connected for around 4 months straight with no glitches, only disconnecting when I needed to ‘bounce’ my gateway PC for updates. This is also testament to the connection provided by my ISP, PlusNet who for all their faults provide rock solid connections for most of their customers (current trial MaxDSL issues aside!).
The answer to the ADSL issue I was experiencing came about almost by chance, the battery in my mobile phone drained after a particulary long working day. Due to this I was forced to use a landline, after finding my telephone I was dismayed to find no dialtone. I probably should say at this point that I’m part of a growing number of people with no need for a landline for day-to-day use, it is there for ADSL only.
After breathing some life back into my mobile, one of my first calls was to BT faults. I could have used the BT website to report the fault, oddly something tells me to use a phone to report a phone fault! As it happens the service is completely automated with various options such as SMS text updates etc.
Roll on Saturday morning, I get a phone call from a BT engineer who is on his way to investigate the problem with the line. Within 10 minutes of his arrival he’s identified the problem as being 15 metres down the line, which just so happens to coincide with the junction box on the wall. Outside and up the ladder he goes, almost instantly proclaiming “think I’ve found the problem!”, pointing feverishly at a single wire that is completely disconnected from the rest and sticking out at right-angles from the wall.
Reconnection of my second wire solved the ‘dialtone’ problem, a fully working phone line again, and resolved my ADSL ‘hiccups’. I queried the BT engineer as to how the ADSL continued to work at full capacity for the most part with so few problems…..
“Even we don’t understand how it works, it’s magic”
July 6th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
I had a similar phenomenon when my phone line was out for a fortnight – but ADSL (coincidentally also with PlusNet) carried on regardless. BT Engineer informed me that apparently ADSL works over a single wire – whereas the phone needs two.