[SWLUG] Switching to a BT line. Effects?

[Chris King]

On Wed, June 25, 2008 11:03, Philip Downer wrote:
> Whilst Andrews and Arnold may be competent BT are not, do not expect any
reasonable level of service from them, remember that a&a are reselling a
BT service and so any complaints to a&a about connectivity will need to
be taken up with BT. I resell DSL through my own company and BT are a
nightmare to deal with, even though I'm dealing with them through an
intermediary but I hear lots of customer issues.

I've been an Andrews and Arnold customer for about 18 months. Yes, they're
damn expensive, but you get a lot for your money (except peak-time quota)
and their technical support is superb - they're not afraid to tackle BT
Wholesale and get customer problems sorted, where other ISP's would just
give up and say "sorry, can't be fixed".

One of the extras they throw for free in is CQM (Continuous Quality
Monitoring) - you can go to your account's control panel and get an
overall picture of the health of your line in real time - LCP echo delay,
upload/download traffic levels etc:

http://www.aaisp.net/cqm.html

You can even request a line test via the control panel, to give you an
idea of BT's view of your line health:

14 Jun 08:21:54	14 Jun 08:21:54 BT Test CopperLineTest:Pass Line test OK .
DS08:Line Test OK - End User Equipment detected

14 Jun 08:20:52	14 Jun 08:20:52 BT Test XDSLStatusCheckTest:Pass OK.
Circuit In Sync BRAS=5500Kb/s FTR=5913Kb/s MSR=7392Kb/s ServOpt=1 I/L=A Up
Sync=832KB/s LoopLoss=19dB SNR=9dB ErrSec=0 HECErr=0 Cells=307696960 Down
Sync=6656KB/s LoopLoss=34dB SNR=9dB ErrSec=0 HECErr=0 Cells=309292030

(My line is normally 6.5Mbit/sec profile, but something caused it to drop
to 5.5Mbit/sec a few days ago)

Chris



-- 
Chris King
http://www.csking.co.uk/