What are faulty tie pairs at the exchange ...

[#1]

... and how long do they take to fix?
If i'm going to be without internet for any additional time after waiting 3 weeks (and paying £150ish for the privilage!) for BT to reconnect my new phone line I'd like some advanced warning, mostly so I can secure myself a hardware (read: unix friendly) dialup modem and an 0808 account while I wait.
--
'Damn and blast British Telecom .. ', said Ford, the words coming easily from force of habit - Douglas Adams

[#2]

Tie pair is the general term given to the pair of wires leaving the exchange to the customer house. How long to repair could be a few hours to months. It whether they can find the fault with the pair you are using or give you a new pair. If there are no free pairs available then new street cabling is required and this can take months.

[#3]

Unless things have changed radically since I left the business in 1999, tie pairs are connections between frames eg between a Main Distribution Frame and an Intermediate Distribution Frame. If a circuit was down because of a faulty tie pair, it would simply be re-jumpered to another one.
I can only see this taking any appreciable time if the whole, or a substantial part, of the cable between the tie pair blocks was accidentally cut or otherwise damaged.

[#4]

Quote from: 4Candles

I can only see this taking any appreciable time if the whole, or a substantial part, of the cable between the tie pair blocks was accidentally cut or otherwise damaged.

If that were the case, surely I'd lose voice service, (unless i grossly misunderstand telephony) which I haven't ...
Still i'm sure that prisoner number 25885683 is having fun in its pool .. but its been there since Friday and must be awfully wrinkely by now.

[#5]

Hiya,
I'm just on hold to BT about this now.

[#6]

Not good news.  BTs next update is September 11th.  We'll give them a ring in about a week to see if there's been any further news.
I'm just trying to sort out your dialup access now.

[#7]

Thanks muchly James.
To reitterate my initial closing comments above ...
Damn and blast British Telecom

[#8]

<If that were the case, surely I'd lose voice service, (unless i grossly misunderstand telephony) which I haven't ...>
Not if it's after the Patch Panel:
http://www.kitz.co.uk/adsl/equip.htm
Sorry to hear Jameseh's bad news. Sounds like it must be a capacity issue, and more tie pairs need to be installed.

[#9]

Yep, that's the angle I'd normally have taken, but if it were just a capacity issue, I wouldn't have expected the delays to be work related and of around a month.
Normally I'd have just expected it to have been a case of waiting for some connections at that exchange to be removed, freeing up more capacity.

[#10]

The exchange checker shows capacity is green ...
WNMAC
County: Powys
Enabled: 01 Sep 2004
Colour: Green VP capacity at this exchange is currently showing as Green.
I'm blaming it on badgers eating the cables .. what with being in the middle of nowhere and all ...

[#11]

The VP Capacity is more of a speed issue than a provisioning issue.
Pesky Badgers.

[#12]

I has been told that my order is due to complete today (a week and a half earlier than Jameseh's initial report from BT), and since my question on the ticket has been sitting stale since Friday I'll re-ask it here.
While I'm being provisioned should my router a) be connected and b) activly trying to connect to Plusnet?
I can stop b) from work .. stopping a) may be a little trickier, unless anyone knows how to disable a NetGear DM111 over telnet (i think ifconfig nas0_0_38 down should do the trick)
Thanks,
Andrew.
(Not currently being impressed with the BOT teams)

[#13]

Hi Andrew,
You're really looking for a solid sync light on your router to identify whether or not the provisioning work has been completed.  Your router may or may not continue to authenticate with us, but often they give up after awhile (ie: stop trying to authenticate after x attempts).
Please do bear in mind that whilst I'm a little surprised that your ticket wasn't picked up (we normally have one or two provisioning staff in on Saturdays), your query wouldn't be something that they would have been able to answer.
In reply to your question, I'd go with PPPoA over bridged whilst you're setting things up.

[#14]

Quote from: Jameseh

Hi Andrew, You're really looking for a solid sync light on your router to identify whether or not the provisioning work has been completed.  Your router may or may not continue to authenticate with us, but often they give up after awhile (ie: stop trying to authenticate after x attempts).

Unfortunatly my router and I are 20 miles apart, so the only information I have is from the modem stats page which I'm keeping half an eye on whilst I'm at work.

Quote

Please do bear in mind that whilst I'm a little surprised that your ticket wasn't picked up (we normally have one or two provisioning staff in on Saturdays), your query wouldn't be something that they would have been able to answer.

Thats fair enough, I probably shouldn't have posted on he forums on a monday morning before my 2nd coffee

Quote

In reply to your question, I'd go with PPPoA over bridged whilst you're setting things up.

If i've still had no joy with sync/connection by the time I get home tonight I'll drop the router in to PPPoA, but for now I'll keep it bridged as the FreeBSD part doing the authentication won't give up after x attempts.
Cheers,
Andrew

[#15]

I'd just like to say thanks for all your help and BT related prodding Jameseh, my connection is alive, kicking at synching at top speeds.
Now to just wait for for my BRAS profile to update to match my new sync speed