Quote:
In fact, I had a BT engineer here today to look at a line fault. He spotted the router and asked "one of ours ?", so I said "kind of...".


Good job for you it wasn't me who came then. I recover our Routers back from ex-rental customers almost daily, leaving them with service or not. It comes under the classification of "UNLUCKY" in my book You want a BT router, you pay to rent it, no rent no router! Your SP has a duty to BT to return that router to us, even if the SP is BT in the first place I still take em

Quote:
..monitoring the faulty line for less than an hour his conclusion was "CPE kit fault"


That is what I would have said, remember our kit is looking at ATM packets, not IP, I have a max testing time of 15 minutes in my testing method. If there are 0 errors in that time experience tells me I am not going to find a fault in the field so I am wasting not only your time but mine as well. Can you imagine how long it will take to find a fault in several km's of network if I have to wait a few hours to see the fault once, then move to the next point and start the test again. This is assuming all the copper tests are 100%.

This may seem harsh, but I've been doing this for 5 years now, I know a line fault when I see one, and if you had seen some of the places I have fitted it, on lines that you would never believe could take broadband, you would start to agree ADSL is a very robust product that works around most minor line fault issues. 2 - 10 a week could be a line card being reset to prove another fault etc... How long does it loose sync for ??? At any fixed time of the day or random ???

Quote:
Do the DSLAMs not have the capability to monitor a line themselves over a prolonged period ?


Some do, but we don't use it as it is hard to tell what the customer has done to his modem during the test period, ie turned the power off. Our standard Woosh system looks at errors over a 15 minute window, but it is not 100% as a test. I'm not sure but I think the offical line of CRC's is about 150 in out 2 minute test period, personally I work to about 50

Cheers

Cris.