Demon G5 ISDN, again

[t***@tfeb.org]

Apologies if this is a near duplicate of an earlier message of mine,
I'm just about to whine furiously at demon / bt and I want to know who
I should whine at if possible.

I'm living in an ADSL-free area, so I'm using ISDN, or rather the BT
home highway thingy. I used to use the BT USB thing, but it never
worked very well and was also Windows-specific, so I'm now using a
Netopia 3100 router. I have the `vanilla' BT surftime offering, which
means I should be able to dial the G5 number (0844 041 6672) off-peak
and have no call charges. I've set up various timed-connect things in
the router to do this automatically. In particular it's set up to dial
up at around 18:30 and keep the line up most of the night, which is
slightly excessive but allows me do to things like have other machines
establish ssh connections to me to sync files and so on.

This has worked in the past (with the same router and the same firmware
in it). It may even work, occasionally, now. What happens most of the
time though is that the call to the G5 number fails - it seems to get a
connection but this is then terminated by the far end. The G4 number
(0844 099 6662) works fine, but isn't free, of course.

The end result is that I'm paying BT some monthly fee for something
that doesn't work: I don't actually get free evening and weekend ISDN
access. I'm fed up with doing this.

What I want to know is whose fault this is: when I asked Demon about it
some months ago, they were fairly clear that they were not even seeing
the dialup attempts. But of course BT say that it's Demon's fault, and
superficially it does look like it must be.

What I don't understand, I think, is what happens when I attempt to
make an ISDN connection: is it like an analogue connection, where BT
just provide a circuit to Demon, or is it more complicated than that
(I'm sure it is). If it's like (or approximately like) an analogue
connection, then it has to be Demon's fault, doesn't it - I can get the
circuit, but then something at Demon's end is screwing up. But if BT
have a larger role to play, then it could easily be their fault. I
have no idea how to diagnose this unfortunately, and I know nothing
about ISDN really.

Can anyone describe what the process is, and give any hints as to how I
could find out what is breaking? I need to know whose head to jump on!
Thanks

--tim

[Bob Evans]

In article <cctslu$***@odbk17.prod.google.com>, "tfb+***@tfeb.org"
<tfb+***@tfeb.org> wrote
[of problems with Demon access via the g5 ISDN number]

Post by t***@tfeb.org
Can anyone describe what the process is, and give any hints as to how I
could find out what is breaking? I need to know whose head to jump on!

The best reference is Denis McMahon's Surftime troubleshooting pages,
now available at <http://www.dsl.co.uk/surftime/>. There you will find
details of the BT-Thus interconnect and the formal procedure for fault
resolution.

Some miscellaneous points:

1. Demon have stated that from their point of view (and subject to
routeing within the BT network), calls to the g5, g4 and Purple ROMP
0845 numbers all terminate on the same equipment.

2. When you (as a BT customer) initiate a call, your "contract" to have
that call delivered correctly to the destination number is with BT. In
the event that that the cause of a particular fault lies outside of the
BT network then (as is explained at the URL referenced above) it is
nevertheless BT's responsibility to follow the documented procedure to
achieve a resolution of the problem.

3. From my observation, Demon/Surftime access faults have, in the main,
tended to fall into one of two categories: either (a) due to a datafill
error, a particular BT exchange has (temporarily) no idea how to
correctly route calls to 0844 041 6662/6672 to their destination and so
connection is not possible; or (b) call routeing takes place correctly
but data synchronisation issues (often occurring at the interface
between BT's network and that of another operator) then result in
connections that perform poorly or drop the call after a brief period.

HTH,

[Brian {Hamilton Kelly}]

Post by t***@tfeb.org
Can anyone describe what the process is, and give any hints as to how I
could find out what is breaking? I need to know whose head to jump on!
Thanks

See <http://www.dsl.co.uk/surftime> and the pages that lead off from
there. This was a website originally constructed by Denis McMahon, who
graciously allowed me to copy it when he ceased to have any interest in
SurfTime (and/or Demon); so there are out-of-date things there, like the
actual prices, and also links to non-existent pages that used to be
elsewhere in Denis' own site.

However, I think it provides the answers to your questions (and perhaps a
strategy for testing and reporting your fault situation).