Friday, July 20, 2007

British Telecom tom-foolery!

Here's a question - has anyone ever had a pleasant experience at the hand of BT tech support? Here is a previous post with another example of their poor customer service.
Anyhow - a few weeks ago I'd set up an audio streaming server for a (non-technical) friend. All was well with him edge-serving the stream to another server that had a shed-load of bandwidth. Now, he has BT broadband and they offered him a free upgrade from his 2meg aDSL to their basic business offering (which is an eight-meg circuit). He jumped, but on the day that they upgraded him his connection went dead - well, the crappy little USB modem claimed it was connected but no traffic would flow. When I got to it I discovered that I could ping IP addresses on the internet but no DNS instantiation was going on. So - I called BT and after the usual 'is your anti-virus up to date' etc. I got to speak to a tech who seemed to know what he was talking about. Eventually he did admit that the fault must be in the BT network and gave me a fault reference number. Why he bothered is anyone's guess because when I'd gone another support rep called back and despite my friend giving him the fault reference number they persuaded my friend the fault must be with his PC!
Anyways - I returned a couple of evenings later with a Draytek Vigor 2600 router (it's the standard router we provide to clients for our remote access support). It has a superb status page and will happily detect correct Virtual Path and Channel Identifiers (VPI and VCI figures). guess what - when BT goes from two to eight megs you need to update the VCI to 38 - why do none of their tech's know this?
Anyhow - it's kind of interesting that with a VCI figure of 37 only some protocols worked - I think the difference is between UDP/IP and ICMP - DNS uses (by default) UDP to do look-ups. I should have forced the PC to do DNS look-up over TCP and seen if it made a difference.

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