Broadband Woes?

I'm back, did you miss me?

Just a little delay. Over the weekend my BTOpenworld connection seemed to slow up , almost to a stop - which is surprise seeing as it is supposed to be a 512KB DSL line.

Saturday morning was slow, but not that slow if you know what I mean. The more people that get onto Broadband, the slower it should get - this is because of what they call contention ratio's (basically the number of people sharing a major connection in the exchange) - so I just "wrote it off" as a busy morning.

When Laura had ago in the early evening, something was more apparently wrong - some of the website pages wouldn't come up, but again I discounted it because, according to the BTOW status page, there were some up and coming work on the various servers, so I thought that was that.

Sunday, being tournament day for Liam, I didn't really bother trying - which is unusual for me, you normally have to prise me off the computer with a crowbar.

The give away was Sunday night. With a tournament report ready to go, and a comment to make on the British Grand Prix, I thought here we go.

OH MY GOD - nothing. The User name and password would be accepted, and that was that. Nothing, Nada, ZIP.

So I went into "Engineer Mode", it's a good job that DSL is one of my work skills. Out came the works laptop and test modem. AT this point I was convinced the problem was me.

What had I altered on the computer?.

Had I downloaded some new software?

However it soon became apparent that it wasn't me. The laptop is setup to test, and that test was coming back with some worrying results. It was obvious that I would have to ring BTOW Technical Support, and I wasn't looking forward to it. BTOW have gained a bit of a reputation for not being the most "supportive" of support people. The shocker was - the nice lad who answered, Karl , listened quietly to what I had to say, asked a few questions, gave me the job reference, and that was that. Anyway I came home from work last night and everything is now "happy in the garden".

I have heard some right horror stories about BTOW, but I can only praise them. This is the first problem I have had in over 12mths of DSL service, and it was sorted within a few hours of reporting it.