Bloomin' Telecoms

British Telecom, the monopolistic supplier of all ADSL connectivity in the UK decided in their infinite wisdom to change their infrastructure recently. In such a way that broke many people’s connections.

It is all a bit technical, and I accept i may not have all of the details correct, but what I understand happened was they changed the MTU of their service.

This is the maximum size that the data packets may be.

They reduced it.

What would happen as a consequence is that when you attempt to upload data to the net (and this may be as simple as sending an email) the transaction never quite completes.

OK, fine, it is their network, they ought to be able to optimise it.

But as far as I understand, not only did they not warn the Internet Service Providers who resell their service, they did not even tell their own reseller!

A friend of mine spent an hour on the phone, being passed up the BT food chain, until he managed to arrive at someone who was able to confirm this.

Goodness knows how many people around the country have been effected.

What compounded the issue for me, was that when I went to reset my new DLink ADSL Router, it broke. I spent a day and a half without connectivity, something that is pretty drastic for me, as I work from home.

After a very long time on the phone to their tech support, they kindly concluded it was the fault of my Mac. Hmmmm, has that got anything to do with the fact that you kept asking me to click on the Start Menu???? Boy oh boy have I heard that rubbish before!!!

Anyhow, they promised that another engineer would contact me to help me solve the problem within “24 to 48 hours”.

Yes, that is very useful to someone in my position.

My colleagues from work were meeting at my house the next day, and what a surprise, none of their machines worked either !!! One of them brought their ADSL Router, and of course it worked first time.

We went out that afternoon and bought me a new Router, and no, it was not a DLink!!

Needless to say, I have not heard back from their engineer, it has been longer than 48 hours too.