One of my customers called the other day to say their internet wasn’t working.
I talked them through various diagnostics over the phone and it became clear that although the internet connection was synchronising there was a problem authenticating the customer.
To confirm the fault I went to the customer premises with a spare modem/router just in case it was an equipment fault.
At the customer premises I confirmed the authentication problem which resulted in the customer’s modem/router not being assigned an IP address or DNS servers.
Our technical guys tried to resolve the problem, but in the end they had to pass the problem to BT as the fault appeared to be associated with the BT equipment at the customer’s local exchange.
Whenever we pass a problem to BT we always get the ominous warning that BT will levy an extortionate call-out charge if the fault is found to be with the customer’s equipment.
Within a few hours of the fault being reported BT advised that they had fixed the problem by doing some work at the exchange.
However, the customer still had no internet connection.
I had to make another visit to the customer premises to investigate.
I confirmed that there was still a problem and called our technical support team.
I was advised by technical support to change the username in the modem/router to a BT test username.
I did this on my first site visit, but this time the router did get assigned an IP address and DNS servers and I could browse to a BT test site.
Clearly BT had done something at the exchange as this did not happen on the first visit.
However, the problem was still there when I changed the modem/router username and password back to those of the customer.
Someone in our technical support bypassed the normal BT fault reporting system to speak to a “mate” in BT to find out what was going on.
With his mate’s help we discovered that on fixing the fault a BT engineer had somehow changed the routing of internet authentication to a different Internet Service Provider.
That was why the customer’s username and password were not being recognised and why an IP address and DNS servers were not being assigned.
Fortunately the mate at BT was able to implement a temporary fix so that the customer could get back on-line as soon as possible.
The situation now is that the problem has been completely resolved by going through the proper BT channels.
Given that BT are eager to charge for abortive call-outs if a fault is with customer equipment I am left wondering why I can’t invoice BT for 2 x abortive call outs caused by their equipment fault and their incompetence in resolving the problem.
Has anyone out there tried this and suceeded?