Bt Faults – What To Do And How To Fix It!
If you read the info on my site here you’ll know that I have been working in the telecoms field for a very long time of which the last couple of years I ran my own company doing design, installs, repairs and fault finding.
Although we covered areas like Aerial, Satellite, Data, Cable and various others, the majority of our work involved fault finding on BT phone lines. Period! BT has been around for ages, I think since the middle 1900’s or something crazy like that. Consequently wiring in some parts are still ancient. I have been in properties where the owner told me the wiring has not been touched for more than 40 years. Ouch! Those jobs were easy, rip out and start fresh!
Now I am not here to bad mouth BT, frankly I couldn’t care less. What I will say is that, in my years in the field I have dealt with some insanely incompetent people on the phone. There were times that I thought I was going to explode, wanting to punch a hole through the wall, again! I think some of you can relate!!? And just know that this was not part of our job, sitting on the phone trying to deal with BT customer service sorting out BT faults. But I felt sorry for my customers and always tried to just ‘quickly’ clarify things between them and the service provider. U know, the technical jargon that the customer was suppose to understand.
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We once went out for a ‘small’ BT fault finding job in London that should have taken us literally 15mins. I won’t go into much detail but I was on the phone with BT for 5 hours/day, three days straight. The job was for an old lady in her 90’s, who was just trying to Skype her daughter in Australia but the internet kept on dropping out intermittently. After doing some vigorous additional tests on top of the initial testing they still refused to send an bt engineer out and admit the fault was at their end, even though I showed them the proof and told them exactly what needed to be done to get this fixed.
In the end I was so fed up I cleaned out her PC, installed everything fresh, used a brand new modem and rewired the whole house with more than adequate wiring, just to get them to come out. Three days later a bt engineer contacted me directly and said they have found a fault on THEIR network and have rectified this. Luckily I wasn’t standing next to a wall or any solid object for that matter!
On the other hand, I have also dealt with great support from BT. Seriously. People that have gone out of their way to help me or the client. Staff that have been understanding and sympathetic and sometimes rectified bt faults almost immediately. U never thought you’d hear anyone say that did you? Look, BT’s customer base is massive and yes, they might lack in support & service in some areas as with a lot of other businesses, but the actual service, once it’s up and running, is pretty good. I had many customers telling me how they loved BT and have never experienced any problems with them what so ever. As I said I’m not here to bad mouth anyone. I’m just providing you with some unbiased info and experiences that might help you along the way.
BT Responsibility – The Technical Stuff
If your house is wired up to spec you should have a black bt external wire coming from outside (either popping out from under the ground or from the BT pole on the street) that enters your house at some point. This should lead to a socket somewhere near the entry point. This, in theory should be your master socket. This outside wire should in theory be connected to the back of the master socket. BT’s Responsibility stops here.
It should have a front plate with two screws connected to it. The back of the front plate is where the rest of the house wiring is connected to. So in an ideal world, if you remove (allowed but not recommended) the front plate it should essentially disconnect the wiring for the whole house allowing us to test whether the bt fault is internal or on the BT network.
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If a bt line fault reported turns out to be in the customers internal wiring BT will charge a substantial amount to rectify this. Any faults leading from behind the master socket all the way to the exchange are BT’s responsibility. In theory! This is a bit of a grey area. You can research online, look at forums and customers experiences if you want. Unfortunately I’m not going to discuss this because I’ll probably just fall asleep half way through.
Please Note: I do NOT recommend you remove the front plate, unless you know what you’re doing. It can get messy. Also not all properties are wired up to spec so if you start fiddling around with it you might end up disconnecting your bt phone line entirely or create additional faults on the line. I did warn you! The above is a very vague explanation and only applies to an ideal situation. There are so many other factors involved but the idea was to just give you a quick overview and not write five pages of technical mumbo jumbo and bore you to death!
Back In The Day
Not too long ago, when I was still grafting away in the field I use to work crazy long hours. Back then I was eager to learn, motivated, determined and money hungry. I mean there were days when I did 13 jobs and worked till 2am in the morning only to get up at 5am again. Weekdays and weekends were all the same to me. My point is that I have dealt with many different customers over the years. Towards the end my business ran completely on referrals.
The one thing that customers said to me over and over again was that they would’ve easily payed me triple the amount I charged, to rectify a problem quicker and more efficiently, than sit on the phone going around in circles trying to work their way through the automated bt fault reporting system. Now obviously not all bt faults can be fixed by independent engineers but if I had to guess I would say that about 90% off all my customer faults where down to internal wiring issues.
Not many people actually know that there are qualified independent x bt engineers out there that can sort problems more quickly, efficiently and to a very high standard. Hallo! I’m here to tell you there are, and some of them are really decent blokes with loads of experience under their belt, which I have hand-picked myself, to provide you with great service. These are the guys that I called when I needed help or advice. To read more click here!
As you know verified BT network faults or issues can’t be resolved by independent engineers for obvious reasons but as I said before, in about 90% of cases the bt fault resides within the customer’s premises. I have been to so many jobs where the customer had been on the phone with BT for days only to arrive there and rectify the fault within 30mins. Bam! Another satisfied customer!
What to do next?
Please note: In the event of a fault ALWAYS contact BT first. If they notice interference at their end they will rectify this within a couple of days, sometimes even the same day. In my experience the response time is actually quite good.
Alternatively you can go to the BT Faults Page below and do various tests online. This is a good place to start. I would recommend doing the online test first and then still contact them to verify the result.
If the online test and confirmation via phone indicates that the fault is internal and not on the BT network, well then you have only one choice left…
Hey, Steph here. Locating Qualified & Experienced, but more importantly, Trustworthy and Reliable Engineers can be quite challenging. So I have done the hard work for you and will be providing you with some Quality Individuals.
