mikeymikec
Lifer
This has been so frustrating.
In the UK, British Telecom (the former state-owned company that controls the traditional phone network and by extension most of the Internet infrastructure) has been pushing to get the traditional copper-wire phone network closed down and for everyone who wants/needs landlines to move on to digital services, so for at least a couple of years my ISP and BT have been nagging me to upgrade my broadband / landline (my landline is my primary point of contact for my business).
I've been putting it off because I've had a fair amount of anxiety over "what if they screw it up and I'm without my landline / business phone number", combined with various customers' experiences that suggest to me that plenty of digital voice migrations have not gone according to plan. After receiving another nag e-mail from my ISP, I decide to get on with it and it would be better to do it sooner rather than wait for the undefined "last minute". During the ordering process, I made it clear via e-mail to my ISP that it's essential that I keep my phone number for my business. At another point in the process, a form that they want me to sign has the phone number as "unlisted", I point this out and they basically said don't worry about that, that's just a quirk of the system.
About a week or so before the broadband upgrade activation date, I started seeing weird issues with broadband connectivity, like web pages not loading properly first time, unlikely "connection refused" messages, etc. Ping tests suggested anywhere between 5-50% packet loss (though I think the problem got progressively worse). As my desktop PC is connected to the router via a network switch followed by mains networking (4 adapters in total throughout the house), I realised that there were plenty of points of failure. So while I was worrying about whether the broadband upgrade and the phone line migration is going to go right, I was dealing with this too and wondering if it's related. I was also trying things like power-cycling the mains networking adapters as they seemed like the likeliest point of failure; after that the problem would seemingly go away for a bit then come back.
Along came broadband activation day, the BT engineer showed up and insisted that the point of entry into the house had to change to another room which throws the wifi reception out of kilter too and puts my office in the furthest corner of the house from the Internet connection point of entry (it used to be directly above). The new broadband took just long enough to activate that I was on the phone to my ISP when it suddenly kicked in about 30 minutes after switching the router on, but the phone hadn't migrated (I had a handset plugged into the original socket and one plugged in to the router's "I can handle an analog handset in this socket via an adapter" feature). I asked my ISP about that and they said give it a couple of hours.
A couple of hours later and my original landline stopped working and the new landline didn't work. They said wait until 7:45 that evening (I found out later that that time is 15 minutes before their tech department closed for the day, on a Friday), come 8PM it still didn't work. I spoke to them on Saturday morning, they said that they would have to refer it to the migrations department which is closed until Monday.
The connectivity issues were still intermittent on my PC and I was trying various things like swapping out adapters as some were seemingly unaffected by what I was seeing in my office.
Come Monday, my ISP admitted that they had bungled the order and that the request to migrate the number hadn't happened, so that would be a week of my business without its primary point of contact. A week later, I had to ring them again and they pressed the "activate" button apparently at which point I could make and receive phone calls, however not everyone could ring me. I e-mailed them and let them know of the latest problem. They're now investigating that after I fulfilled their request to supply three landline numbers that have tried to ring my line, what the message was that they received and what dates/times these happened.
Back to the connectivity issue in my office - at some point I decided to focus on the network switch and unplugged it for a minute and reconnected it, which again seemed to solve the problem for a time. I convinced my wife to let me run a 30-metre network cable through the house to give me a direct connection to the router and at the same time I bought a new gigabit network switch. I found this morning that bypassing my mains networking adapter hasn't helped so I've installed the new switch. Fingers crossed!
On the plus side, since running that new cable through the house, my computer now gets ~500mbit/sec download and I downloaded the Win11 25H2 US ISO in about 2 minutes 🙂 (I have both the English International ISO and the US ISO because the former is what I normally need but often OEM installs are US)
In the UK, British Telecom (the former state-owned company that controls the traditional phone network and by extension most of the Internet infrastructure) has been pushing to get the traditional copper-wire phone network closed down and for everyone who wants/needs landlines to move on to digital services, so for at least a couple of years my ISP and BT have been nagging me to upgrade my broadband / landline (my landline is my primary point of contact for my business).
I've been putting it off because I've had a fair amount of anxiety over "what if they screw it up and I'm without my landline / business phone number", combined with various customers' experiences that suggest to me that plenty of digital voice migrations have not gone according to plan. After receiving another nag e-mail from my ISP, I decide to get on with it and it would be better to do it sooner rather than wait for the undefined "last minute". During the ordering process, I made it clear via e-mail to my ISP that it's essential that I keep my phone number for my business. At another point in the process, a form that they want me to sign has the phone number as "unlisted", I point this out and they basically said don't worry about that, that's just a quirk of the system.
About a week or so before the broadband upgrade activation date, I started seeing weird issues with broadband connectivity, like web pages not loading properly first time, unlikely "connection refused" messages, etc. Ping tests suggested anywhere between 5-50% packet loss (though I think the problem got progressively worse). As my desktop PC is connected to the router via a network switch followed by mains networking (4 adapters in total throughout the house), I realised that there were plenty of points of failure. So while I was worrying about whether the broadband upgrade and the phone line migration is going to go right, I was dealing with this too and wondering if it's related. I was also trying things like power-cycling the mains networking adapters as they seemed like the likeliest point of failure; after that the problem would seemingly go away for a bit then come back.
Along came broadband activation day, the BT engineer showed up and insisted that the point of entry into the house had to change to another room which throws the wifi reception out of kilter too and puts my office in the furthest corner of the house from the Internet connection point of entry (it used to be directly above). The new broadband took just long enough to activate that I was on the phone to my ISP when it suddenly kicked in about 30 minutes after switching the router on, but the phone hadn't migrated (I had a handset plugged into the original socket and one plugged in to the router's "I can handle an analog handset in this socket via an adapter" feature). I asked my ISP about that and they said give it a couple of hours.
A couple of hours later and my original landline stopped working and the new landline didn't work. They said wait until 7:45 that evening (I found out later that that time is 15 minutes before their tech department closed for the day, on a Friday), come 8PM it still didn't work. I spoke to them on Saturday morning, they said that they would have to refer it to the migrations department which is closed until Monday.
The connectivity issues were still intermittent on my PC and I was trying various things like swapping out adapters as some were seemingly unaffected by what I was seeing in my office.
Come Monday, my ISP admitted that they had bungled the order and that the request to migrate the number hadn't happened, so that would be a week of my business without its primary point of contact. A week later, I had to ring them again and they pressed the "activate" button apparently at which point I could make and receive phone calls, however not everyone could ring me. I e-mailed them and let them know of the latest problem. They're now investigating that after I fulfilled their request to supply three landline numbers that have tried to ring my line, what the message was that they received and what dates/times these happened.
Back to the connectivity issue in my office - at some point I decided to focus on the network switch and unplugged it for a minute and reconnected it, which again seemed to solve the problem for a time. I convinced my wife to let me run a 30-metre network cable through the house to give me a direct connection to the router and at the same time I bought a new gigabit network switch. I found this morning that bypassing my mains networking adapter hasn't helped so I've installed the new switch. Fingers crossed!
On the plus side, since running that new cable through the house, my computer now gets ~500mbit/sec download and I downloaded the Win11 25H2 US ISO in about 2 minutes 🙂 (I have both the English International ISO and the US ISO because the former is what I normally need but often OEM installs are US)
