Hi All,
I do seem to attract the weird and wonderful problems with my FTTP Plusnet line in rural Scotland.
The issue being discussed here has now been resolved, but this may be useful for others just in case anyone experiences similar.
So... Our story starts with Storm Arwen which really hit our area on the 26th November. Fortunately no trees came down on our phoneline and in the morning of the day after I was happy our phoneline and broadband had been perfect throughout the worst of the storm. However, at about 9 AM we lost Internet connectivity. A quick check identified there was no issues with the physical line obvious.
What had happened is a power cut affecting where the cabinet was. The cabinet we think ran on battery backup for a short period of time but then shutdown or switched off when the battery was depleted.
The cabinet was without power for six days!
Our village actually made the BBC News as one of the areas without power. Fortunately our house only had a power outage for a few hours, and the broadband equipment is all on UPS so never lost power.
When power was restored to the cabinet my other (non Plusnet) phoneline came back up and the broadband resynced fine and all was good with that line. However my Plusnet line was still down.
The line had no sync and strangely we also had no dial tone on the phone (analogue).
This was reported to Plusnet using there “Text a Line Test” thing, and it did identify a problem, but then later tests identified there was no problem found. As we still didn’t have dial tone or sync an engineer was requested.
This engineer was planned for Monday 13th December AM slot, but I got a call from Openreach call centre on the Monday at about 13:30 saying due to resourcing restrictions no-one was available and could they do the next day.
The engineer visited the cabinet the next day and did a Lift-and-shift to a different port in the cabinet – this restored sync, but there was still no dial tone, and the PPP session would not establish. Openreach reported the fault as fixed but it clearly was not.
Plusnet support agreed with my view and an engineer came back out this morning (Thursday 16th Dec) to have another look. Luckily it was the same engineer.
Now, this is where it gets interesting. He phoned from the cabinet (to my mobile) and talked through the issues and said “something was very strange”. He then asked if he could visit me and put a tone tester to trace the line.
He then said he would now trace the line back to the cabinet as it seemed the ports were “wrong”.
About and hour later all was fixed – I had dial tone in the phone, the line was back in sync and I had re-established the Plusnet PPP connection and everything was working as expected.
What apparently happened was when the cabinet lost power it lost it’s configuration.
When power was restored it started up with an “old configuration from a backup” – this meant that any cabinet level configuration made since that backup were lost. This was the stated reason for all my problems – the line originally didn’t sync because when the backup was taken my line was not FTTC – it was still ADSL2+
When the engineer did the Tuesday lift and shift it put me on what was meant to be an unused port but because of the config being months old was actually providing sync, but was not assigned to a Plusnet customer so my Plusnet login would never work.
When he called to check everything was working he explained the above and how various systems had to be updated at the back end to make it all work again.
I was without Internet via my Plusnet line for 19 days, however I don’t lay any blame at all on Plusnet.
Six days of that 19 were due to the cabinet not having power – something I think will need to be investigated nationwide as this is an issue for areas that loose power, the remaining 13 days were due to poor management of cabinet configuration.
Throughout all of this Plusnet have been great – they have called frequently and have kept the ticket up to date.
So, the TL:DR version is:
- Cabinets loose power quickly if there is a power cut affecting them – their batteries don’t last long.
- The configuration of the devices in the cabinet determines which ports are which and can be lost
- When a cabinet reboots it loads a configuration – if this wasn’t the one it had when it lost power this is what can happen.
I was lucky that Plusnet were so good about pushing for an engineer to attend and re-attend, and that that engineer actually assessed the problem and fixed it rather than just doing the basics.
Sorry for the long post, but this is one of the more interesting faults I've had!
