Or rather.. good, high frequency signals over copper telephone wires.
I got home at 8:05pm, plugged in the details set to me by Nildram for the ADSL, expecting nothing to happen as the line isn’t due to come online ’til Friday.. Hit the “Connect” button for the hell of it and was surprised to discover that it worked!
So now I’m ADSL’d!
This
afternoon the details of my Nildram ADSL account arrived, which means that
my line passed its tests. However, the activation date is Friday, not Thursday
as first told. At least it IS this week.
As for work thingies.. I’m having to sit here quite late tonight hand holding
the A0 printer so that people going to the American Geophysical Union’s fall
meeting in SanFransisco can print their posters out just before they go off
to catch their plane. It doesn’t help that I’m feeling so very tired at the
moment for some unknown reason.
The tiredness came on all of a sudden at about 3:30pm. I have no idea why.
There’s
still no news about my ADSL link from Nildram today. Oh well. it looks more
and more like it’s going to be a lot later than Thursday before I’m connected.
(If at all)
Well,
as I expected, BT rang me up mid-morning, failed to find me in my office
and left a voisemail. “We have done a test on your line from the exchange
and can find no faults. If you have any other problems please call us on
0800 679 849.”
Well, it’s obvious that the approx 50Hz hum with overtones which go in and
out of phase it merely a figment of my and my modem’s imagination. If BT’s
wonderful diagnostic kit in their exchanges can’t find anything wrong then
obviously it must be an illusion, right?
I’ve been trying to phone the number they gave in the call to try to get
them to send out an engineer to my house so he can hear the dillusional noise
on the line as well. The problem is that the number is constantly engaged.
Maybe BT’s call centre has a fault on the line.
Since last week I’ve phoned up the BT fault reporting line a couple of times to check out my poor phone line, hoping that they would find and fix the quality before the ADSL tests were done.
One good thing is that I actually could get through. The last time I managed to get through the person who did a line test failed to cancel it on the call system. This menat that for the next 6 months when I tried to replort the fault I never got the opportunity as the BT phone system would tell me that a test was in progress, so I didn’t get to a human. I gave up after 6 months. Maybe after 18 months to 2 years the system times out.
This evening I finally got them to recognise that there WAS a problem with the line. They say it should be tested and fixed by tomorrow afternoon. Of course, if they are true to their 3-4 day period for testing my line for ADSL this line problem fixture will have missed the window. I hope BT haven’t now marked my line as not ADSL capable and that this stigma isn’t set in stone if the test was done while there’s a line fault.
Am I too much of a pesimist where BT are concerned?
I’ve
6 days to wait (hopefully) ’til my ADSL line is in operation. It’s like waiting
for Christmas. I never was very good at being patient.
Of course, once I do get it up and running it won’t be anywhere near as exciting
as it seems to be now. Once I’ve done all the configuration and it’s up and
running it’ll pass into being just one of the normal services I have, just
like digital telly did.
Anyway, this is still counting Chickens until BT have ok’ed the line and it’s all up and running.
Well, my new D-Link ADSL/Ethernet modem arrived this morning. So, all that needs to happen before my link is active is the following:-
I do hope that the line checks out otherwise I’ve spent lots of money on useless things.
I got an e-mail from Nildram this morning saying that they’ve confirmed my details (ie. it took them 1.5 days to check my switch card) and that they’ve ordered an ADSL upgrade on my phone line.
Apparently it’ll take BT 3-4 days to test my line to see if it will work.
I’ve just ordered ADSL for home.. Assuming the line is OK it means I have to spend another 70-80 quid on an ADSL/Ethernet modem and a few line filters.
