Thanks to iDNet

[nowster]

As you may remember, the iDNet account is my parents' one. I used to be in the ISP industry but got out of it in 2009, and we moved their ADSL service to iDNet shortly after.

In the weeks up to Christmas, OpenReach were installing fibre on the telegraph poles along the rural road my parents live on. But they stopped the job just before Christmas and didn't do the last few houses on the run, missing my parents' place by a couple of hundred yards.

After no movement from OpenReach in the earlier part of this year, my dad wrote to his local councillor trying to get some answers. Their landline was suffering from inductive pickup from an electric fence somewhere along the long run back to the exchange. It was just enough to destabilize their ADSL signal. They'd had OpenReach to the line many times over the years, usually due to water ingress causing corrosion in the junction boxes, and on two occasions high winds snapping the cable off the poles.

Then EE said they were removing service from their 3G booster box (nano cell), and that was the last straw even though it wasn't related.

A couple of weeks after the letter, OpenReach were knocking on the door offering to install an FTTP Optical Network Terminator (ONT) box, and apologising for not finishing the job last year.

He was left with instructions from the engineer that when the green light (PON) went steady he could order service. (This was wrong.)

I was on holiday at the time, but fired off an email to iDNet support. Chloe replied with not quite the right information, meaning I delayed things.

We waited for the green light to go steady. I checked the online availability checker. I also tried the portal "Upgrade to FTTP" button.

And then eventually the online checker said "yes, you can order FTTP". But the portal said, nope, the best you're going to get is 1Mbps ADSL, which is less than we're allowed to let you order. (My guess is that it failed because the house name registered on the iDNet account didn't exactly match OpenReach's data.)

We get an email from the Chief Engineer's Office at OpenReach saying, basically, "We've done all this work. Are you going to place an order now?"

I contacted iDNet again. This time Heather answered and the story was totally different. Yes, we could switch to FTTP. Yes, we could keep the same IP addresses and login details. Yes, we could keep the existing ADSL until we had the new service working. Yes, they did the 12 months for the price of 11 deal if you paid annually. We placed the order that morning.

I rang back the Technical Escalations Engineer at OpenReach. He explained that the process he'd used was backwards to the normal one, as usually it's the ISP's order that triggers the installation of the ONT, and that without the order the ONT would never be enabled at the exchange end.

He confirmed that he could see the order from iDNet and would advance it through their systems manually. We should see things enabled by the following day at the latest.

Mid afternoon, the PON light went steady.

A couple of years ago, due to the limitations of a previous ADSL modem-router, I'd switched the configuration of the modem to "pass through" and used a Raspberry Pi to act as a router, using PPPoE. This meant they had working IPv4 and IPv6, and I could put something in to perform some traffic control/shaping manage the "buffer bloat" in the modem, meaning that voice traffic (from the 3G booster) could get through even if something was doing a big upload or download.

Because they already had a PPPoE router, and the login details weren't changing, and it didn't need a VLAN configured, the switch was trivial: unplug the Ethernet patch lead from the ADSL modem and turn off the modem, plug an Ethernet patch lead into the ONT and the router. A minute later they had working FTTP 50/10.

It was a bit of an anticlimax. 

Thanks to Heather at iDNet for dealing with things so quickly and to Andy at OpenReach for getting things moving in the first place.

[Simon]

Good to hear a satisfactory end result!

[zappaDPJ]

It was a bit of an anticlimax. 

It's always a bit of shocker when things go right