FT line hopelessly unreliable.

[dave21478]

Hi.

In the six months I have been in this house, the FT line has gone down more often than I can remember. Once was an internal cable problem (mouse ate it!) but the rest of the failures have been somewhere else down the line.

We have the normal FT line, with ADSL through them too. Sometimes its just phone that goes, sometimes just internet, sometimes its both.

I have already had reductions on my bill as compensation for the number of faults we have had, but its getting silly now. Tonight AGAIN, the phone is not working.

Realistically, what can I do? Every time I call up, they are "sorry" and send someone to fix the fault but nothing really changes. after each repair its only a matter of time till it fails again, but this doesnt seem to bother them in the slightest, they react to the failures but refuse to be proactive about upgrading or replacing the lines. I have explained that I am running gites here and NEED the phone and adsl to be reliable, but this is of no interest to them.

99% of the time I never see the engineer as I assume he finds the fault further away from the house. The last time they were out, he jiggered around with the junction box on the first pole outside the house. When I asked him, he said it was just a poor connection due to damp ingress.

 

I assume if I ditched them and went with Neuf or similar, things would be no better, and possibly worse, as its the technology between the exchange and here that is the problem, not the telephone service. Would neuf etc be able to repair the line, or would they be sending the same local guy that FT use out to scrape the contacts in a junction box at the roadside somewhere?

 

[Danny]

I don't see any prospect of improvement if you change your supplier. As I understand it, even if you are in a zone degroupée, the lines and network is still maintained by FT who then charge your supplier for the work.

Danny

[Bugsy]

Hi Dave,

It's just the luck of the draw with FT. We had a similar problem when we first moved here. It took a lot of moaning before they finally agreed to renew the lines to our commune.

Changing your provider will achieve nothing as they don't do line repairs.

Good luck with it.

You could always try a bit of 'snipping' in the middle of the night..................[:D][:D]

[Mr Coeur de Lion]

We had problems at first. FT came out a couple of times, repaired the problem, but it kept coming back. In the end, I replaced the cable inside the house and it's been much better. However, whenever it rains, we intermittantly lose the internet. And this normally happens when I'm streaming the football! grrrr!