Fixing an Openzone Access Point

[Seraphsailor]

How long can I expect to wait for BT to come along and fix a local Openzone access point?

Now into week 3 of an access point being reported as down and no sign of BT coming to fix it.

If BT want to know which one - an access point in Royal Clarence Marina; postcode PO12 1AX

[Naishy]

I'll look into it...

Tim

[Naishy]

I've spoken to BT Openzone Support and they tell me that they can see users using the service today; apparently there are 2 access points, and both of them are showing a connection to the router.  It all looks fine from their end.

Can you be more specific about the issue you are seeing?

Tim

[Seraphsailor]

Hi Tim,

3 antennae. I don't know whether there are 3 AP's or 2 AP's and a repeater; one of these 3 is down.

Doesn't specifically bother me as I have a repeatit wifi aerial and can see wireless routers 4 miles away! Others in the marina are suffering though.

Cheers,

Steve

[Seraphsailor]

Hi Tim, been having a dialogue with OZ support since last Thursday. BT changed the working OZ AP01 from channel 4 to 9 and since then it's been running like a dog; takes ages to logon to the network and then it can panic and drop straight away. If I get on-line then it stops working - can't even do a ping and it crashes. BT OZ support are helpful but useless - they are waiting to hear from their 3rd party as to when they might get round to looking at it (and APO2 (ch 6) has not worked for months!!!) - so no information as to when it might be looked at; let alone resolved!!! I can't work to maximum effect whilst OZ is down and with no resolution in sight I'll be trying other providers over the next few days (buy online and then use Distance Selling Regs to return if no good 🙂 3 will give me 14 days free trial). If one of them works OK I'll just email BT accounts and tell them I'm cancelling as there is no support from BT on a system that I use that is down (I reported this to BT last Thursday); let them threaten to take me to court and I'll say "bring it on!!!". So BT may well lose another PAYING customer ; primarily because support and resolution is so poor - sad isn't it?

[Seraphsailor]

Hi Tim, just an update

you've said:

I've spoken to BT Openzone Support and they tell me that they can see users using the service today; apparently there are 2 access points, and both of them are showing a connection to the router.  It all looks fine from their end.

It has been rubbish since the 19th November and it is not fine. BT continue to hide behind "wider issues which are being discussed". Whilst these are being discussed BT can fix the basic issue of a working service. A wide group within BT; from Oz support to Sir Michael Rake's office, are aware of the problems and certain people in Exeter say they care but are as useful as chocolate teapots.

So what are some basic issues? Well, see some hardwire pictures of your network here - every picture is a possible pinchpoint, root cause, and should be looked at.

[Seraphsailor]

Despite my trying to shake up BT to fix the AP here I don't think it's going to happen. I've had a call from the CEO's problem managment team yesterday; this issue was on a meeting agenda to be discussed last week; but due to time constraints it wasn't discussed and carried forward! In my day then issues of quality, service delivery, customer satisfaction were high on the agenda - not pushed to the back!

Why the need for discussion at this level? - all they need to do is tell Sally and Dan in Exeter to get on the case and fix it.

Why aren't BT fixing it? I find out that the contract here is up for renewal in the new year  - and given the poor customer service from BT re issues in the past is unlikely to be renewed - so even though BT have a current contract for delivery here they are renaging on their service maintenance/system down issues; so it looks like the bean counters override customer concerns and complaints re service delivery; to me it speaks volumes re the lack of customer care within BT whilst they choose to ride roughshod over their PAYING customers.

[Seraphsailor]

Well, it's 2010 and not a sign of anyone turning up from BT to fix:

a) access point reported as down in August 2009

b) unuseable service since November 19th 2009 - pictures sent, etc.

Here is what an ISP provider says about BT care

http://aaisp.blogspot.com/2009/12/info-do-bt-care-about-fixing-broadband.html

Love these bits:

It seems to us, in our opinion, that BT just do not care about actually fixing faults. That is our view from our experience.

...the challenge for us and BT, is somehow to change the attitude within BT so that they start to care and start to actually try and fix faults...

BT staff; hang your heads in shame (not just the technical staff; but ALL staff from Sir Michael Rake down - you ALL take responsibility for customer care).

[Seraphsailor]

Just though I would "bump" this thread.

Almost the end of February 2010 and still no sign or update from BT on fixing the problem.

I've not mentioned previously that this is not a cafe or home-owned hotspot via someones home hub. It is a BT installed and managed point.

Just once in a while it will come up and have a half hearted attempt at deiivering a service - and I managed to grab the following information during one of these times:

A test extract (and it is not my laptops (XP and Vista)  network connectivity from my laptops or any unusual or exceptional circumstances).

We recorded a packet loss of 87%. This loss is very significant and will lead to serious performance problems.  

The time it takes for your computer to set up a TCP connection with our server is 1300 msec, which is quite high. This may be due to a variety of factors, ..... a particularly slow or poor network link, or problems in your network.

the applet continuously measures the state of the network in the background, looking for short outages. During testing, the applet observed 62 such outages. The longest outage lasted for 41.8 seconds. This suggests a general problem with the network where connectivity is intermittent.

Network buffer measurements: Uplink 1000 ms, Downlink 9800 ms

We estimate your uplink as having 1000 msec of buffering. This is quite high, and you may experience substantial disruption to your network performance

[Seraphsailor]

Well, early April now and the OZ point still runs like a dog. Management are looking to change supplier and I know that BT, in prep for a proposed  supplier change, were doing some line tracing yesterday; from what I could see no-one was on site so I guess this was exchange type work.

About 12:15 the OZ point pannicked and went down. It came back about 10 minutes later and was back to it's old, good self; I downloaded a 120MB Office update in about 3 minutes. About 1:30 it went back to running like a dog again.

So it is fixable; so KerryG; please pass this onto those people in BT that just might (I say again, just might) care enough to fix it. Meanwhile I await the imminent information re Tesco's doing their own dongle (and bundle) service (on the back of the O2 network) and being in a position to possibly rid myself of attrocious BT service care.