I’ve discussed previously how bad service from BT seems to be in my opinion, and that is just one more entry in the catalogue of problems British Telecom has caused me in the past, not to mention the problems faced by others throughout the UK.
One of my customers who runs a takeaway business in town came to me with a problem he was having with his new broadband equipment; a BT Business Broadband Router.
He was trying to get it set up so that he could access the internet from his premises but had thus far been unsuccessful. He called me in and I set to work.
I estimated over the phone that the work would take just 15 minutes or so, but I was grossly mistaken.
Setting up this particular piece of kit needed to be done by following a set up tutorial on the provided CD while inputting required information at various points, including the serial number of the router and ‘first-time login’ details.
The tutorial would not progress past the question “Is the Broadband light on the router showing steady green?”. I to wouldn’t progress because I could not answer YES to the question, there was no steady green light, instead it flashed every time I reached that point in the set up routine. Until that point it would show steady green quite happily.
I tried answering YES several times despite the issue, but after that point the set up routine looked for the internet connection and could not find it.
During troubleshooting I checked that all the connections were correct, that micro-filters were placed on all phone sockets and reset the router several times. I ran the setup a few times. Checked the connection via CMD (ipconfig /all, /release, /renew etc) and still the same result.
I determined that the router hardware was most likely faulty and that my client should contact BT for further help.
At the end of the job, which took a little over an hour – 4 times longer than anticipated – I felt rather disappointed for both myself and my client. It is on these occasions that I hate what I do, because I am left wondering if my inability to resolve the issue was truly down to faulty hardware, or my own incapability. Hopefully my client will come back to me and let me know if he was able to resolve the issue with a replacement router from British Telecom, or if they could get him up and running over the phone.
UPDATE – 25th Febraury 2009
After speaking tonight with my customer it is now known that the BT Business Broadband Router was faulty, which was revealed after BT sent out a new replacement and the customer was online within just a few minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment