Y Safle

In the UK, no matter what ISP you use, you pretty much always end up dealing with BT engineers. This is really really bad, because BT Openreach engineers are so variable.

Today we had one of the bad ones. He calloed when I was out of the house, so he thought he would bamboozle my wife with his brilliance. After first refusing to do the actual line test he was sent to do, he told my wife that the reason we can only get a quarter of the ADSL line speed is because of our house wiring.

“But we had our wiring checked by a qualified BT engineer” my wife interjected, but he would have none of it. He told her that we were syncing with the exchange fine from the master test socket.

Well of course. As we had explained, we can always sync at 8Mbps or thereabouts. The problem is that when we use the BT speed test page, using the dedicated speed test account over the BT network to their test server, we get much lower speeds.

His answer to my wife: “People always blame BT openreach, but the problem is the ISPs”.

No Mr BT engineer (DJ), the problem is the BT network. Notice what we had already established:

1. The wiring is fine
2. I used the test socket to test the connection using the BT account. Our ISP network was not part of the equation, and nor was our wiring.

But, of course, the engineer refused to do this test. He merely tested the sync speed, and surprise surprise got the same results as us.

Why did we even have an engineer here when a previous engineer had already been out and tested everything successfully? Because we had the temerity to ask when BT would fix the Aberystwyth Exchange. This exchange has been underperforming for months, and every time BTs deadline to fix it comes up, they just extend the deadline. Thus our ISP wanted to know when the work was really going to be carried out. BTs answer was to send us an engineer that we did not need, did not want to come and tell us a load of rubbish.

Some more choice nonsense from this engineer. He said that we could not get faster speeds because we are using USB modems. “No we are not”, replied my wife. “We have a router - a BT router at that”.

Oh, thinks the engineer quickly. Okay, the problem is that you are using wireless. This slows everything right down. (although actually when I run tests I do not use wireless). He asked: “What speed wireless. Is this 100K or 54K”.

“It is IEEE 802.11g” my wife replied. (She hears me speak about it often enough that she knows the numbers).

“Yes, but is that 54K g or 100K g?” Replies the engineer, implying my wife is stupid for not knowing.

Now for anyone that does not know, IEEE 802.11g runs at 54Mbps (although allowing for protocol overhead, you probably only achieve 30Mbps, which is still much faster than the ADSL line). The 100Mbps standard (not 100K) is IEE 802.11n, and the slower standard that I think he must have alluded to is IEEE 802.11b.

802.11b is the 11Mbps standard, which with protocol overhead would likely achieve less than the ADSL’s 8Mbps (especially if signal reception is poor). But my wife had answered correctly. We were not using wireless that would slow down the network path (except perhaps for some initial latency which is more or less unnoticeable).

So having betrayed his enormous ignorance, he decides to do so once again.

“You probably do not have computers capable of running at 8Mbps. You need dual core for that”.

I am flabbergasted. How, for instance, do we explain the fact that we had 10Mbps ethernet connections which actually achieved that speed at least as far back as 1997 on consumer devices (before that, often network cards could not actually manage the full 10Mbps, even though the networks could).

How do we explain that we regularly achieve 100Mbps over the house ethernet? (perhaps he did not spot our ethernet!)

And worst of all, how dare he insult my computers. We have at least 10 computers in the house, and two of them have dual core technology.

This is the worst kind of buck passing ignorance that I have heard since… since…

Oh, since this debacle with BT.

Just to be fair - the previous BT engineer we had out was excellent. He seemed to know his stuff, and he actually carried out the tests he was sent to do. Not everyone at BT is as bad as DJ. But enough are that it is no wonder broadband takeup in the UK is now languishing.

We read yesterday:

BT hit by cheap offers in race to grab broadband customers. It seems that BT are upset that people offering free and cheap broadband are taking their market share, but I would suggest that if there is a problem with BT broadband numbers then the reasons might have more to do with the fact that this is a communications company that is entirely unable to communicate with its customers.

I sent this letter to BT 3 times and never once got so much as an acknowledgment of receipt from them. The letter itself was about their failure to communicate!

I predict more headlines like this one in the future.

I sent the following letter to the BT UK Correspondence Centre 3 times. I never once got an answer. I cancelled my BT subscription, but to re-use my efforts, I offer this sorry tale for your amusement.

Dear Sir/Madam

Re. Fault with BT SMTP Service Affecting Our Account

On or about Thursday 26th January 2006, BT Internet reconfigured their SMTP server service manually or automatically in some manner that caused a loss of service from our BT Internet account (xxxxxxxx.x.xxxxxxx@btinternet.com). We use a variety of laptops, desktop PCs and PDAs to access our account, depending on where we are in the house and what we are doing, and the failure affected all of these devices.

The symptoms of the failure were we could no longer send mail, because the SMTP authentication failed. However, we had not reconfigured SMTP authentication, and the password was clearly fine as we could continue to receive mail from the POP3 service, and use web mail.

Online Support

After waiting for a day or two to see if the problem would correct itself, my wife decided to contact technical support on Sunday 29th January, as she had an email she needed to send. She spent a couple of hours with the technical support to no avail. In this time, they made some suggestions that I think, as an ICT professional, were unacceptable, and you will want to review these issues:

1. At no point did the call centre take on board that this was a fault that had simultaneously affected multiple setups on diverse operating systems. When my wife asked if anything had changed on the mail server, she was adamantly told “no”, despite clear evidence to the contrary, and the fact that the call centre were clearly not in a position to know this.
2. On discovering that my wife was using Microsoft Outlook to read email, she was told that as this was not a supported mailer, she should take the issue up with Microsoft! Now this response annoyed me because
   1. the problem was very clearly not with the mail software,
   2. my wife could easily switch to Outlook Express if that is what was necessary,
3. If you say that you only support Outlook Express, and will not help with problems on any other mailer, then you lock yourself into proprietary Microsoft technologies. You are saying that users of other operating systems, handheld devices, text only mailers and mailers used by people with disabilities cannot access technical support. This is probably in breach of your duties under the disabilities discrimination act, and is certainly bad business sense, as you are saying that there is a huge user base that you do not want as customers. You do not seem to want users of open source software, for instance - despite the fact that your SMTP service is itself the open source qmail SMTP server.
4. Your support staff did not tell my wife what she needed to tell Microsoft. Certainly Microsoft have no interest in a sudden loss of service to the BT Internet mail service, and would send the problem straight back to you. This kind of passing-the-buck is not acceptable from a service that should be attempting to help customers resolve problems.

My wife, on my instruction, transferred to Outlook Express and refused to close the support call. After a while, the call centre asked if we had a firewall enabled. Quite sensibly we do run a firewall in our ADSL router, and the support centre suggested we disable it. I immediately disabled the firewall, and in the meantime established the further information that sending mail still worked from our dial up BT Internet account. However the call centre staff would not take our assurances that the firewall was disabled for granted, and informed us that we must contact our firewall vendor!!! Repeated insistence that the firewall was disabled eventually prompted the call centre to give us a telephone number through which we could escalate the fault.

Telephone Support

I called the support centre on Sunday evening to escalate the fault, and despite my telling the operator that we had been through online support, I was asked all the same questions. Yes, I had (grudgingly) booted my Linux laptop into windows and was running Outlook Express. No, we did not have a firewall running, and so on. At this point I was asked what ADSL modem we were using. I indicated that we had an ADSL router, and your call centre staff told me that the router must have a firewall and I needed to contact my vendor!

At this point, please bear in mind that (a) I had disabled the firewall, (b) the router had been working fine to date, and (c) the problem was failure of authentication, not failure to connect to the SMTP server. Again, this is a pass-the-buck attitude to support that must be dealt with. It is quite unacceptable.

I told your operator firmly (but quietly and politely) that the problem was with the BT SMTP server, and that he needed to escalate the fault - that the fault lay in a failure by the SMTP server to accept our fully resolved broadband IP address as a valid relay domain for our credentials. I reiterated that we had been through the online support process, and that the support centre had already been unable to help, and that the problem should be escalated to a suitable engineer. The operator refused to escalate at this point (some 10 minutes into the call) and continued to offer suggestions to fix the problem. I politely continued working with your staff to try various suggestions.

At one point your operator asked me to connect by hand to the SMTP service. This I did (I told him the port numbers as he started mentioning port 110, which is the POP service. Port 25 is SMTP). We quickly established that my communication was fine and I gave him my ADSL IP address. After many suggestions and many long periods of holding, your operator eventually agreed to escalate the fault some 50 minutes after I had place my call.

It seems to me that all companies I deal with who use outsourced support these days require me to speak to them for about an hour before they will eventually admit to pass on a fault to a technical contact. I am unhappy about this, and you really need to consider a means by which technical people can send technical queries to their peers, without this timewasting filter.

I indicated I would be going to bed at this point, and could the technical support engineer call me in the morning. The operator said he would pass on the message. No call was ever returned.

I would like a call credit for the time spent on this call - particularly as your operator refused to escalate the fault, and also because no call back was ever received.

Email Support

On the afternoon of Tuesday 31st January I used the BT web site to send an email about this fault. Prior to sending this email, on Monday night I spent some time investigating the fault, and discovered the following:

I connected by broadband and captured this SMTP session information: (I have obfuscated the base64 encoded password, but otherwise the session is exactly as seen on the SMTP server):

220 smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com ESMTP EHLO eeyore.gloomyplace.org.uk 250-smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XYMCOOKIE 250-PIPELINING 250 8BITMIMEAUTH LOGIN 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 c3RsalcGdshabi2wLmtJJpzdG9u 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 aXblRmsqXQQ= 535 authorization failed (#5.7.0)

The WAN configuration for this connection was:

ppp0 Link encap:Point-Point Protocol inet addr:86.145.210.33 P-t-P:217.32.86.146 Mask:255.255.255.255

According to dig, the IP address 86.145.210.33 resolves as:

22.210.145.86.in-addr.arpa. PTR IN 604800 host86-145-210-22.range86-145.btcentralplus.com.

I then repeated the experiment with the broadband disabled, and connected via dialup. Here is the chat, which you will note succeeds:

220 smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com ESMTP ehlo eeyore.gloomyplace.org.uk 250-smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XYMCOOKIE 250-PIPELINING 250 8BITMIME AUTH LOGIN 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 c3RlcGsaqhlfdfbdi5wsqasLdsd672 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 aXblRdsjkXaQ= 235 ok, go ahead (#2.0.0) ...

The dialup IP/gateway info was:

213.122.53.24/32 gw 213.122.53.24

This IP address resolves to:

24.53.122.213.in-addr.arpa. PTR IN 604800 host213-122-53-24.in-addr.btopenworld.com.

I sent all of this information with various suggestions in the email. I noted that the problem could be in the way that qmail is building its authsenders file (or PAM equivalent), and pointed out that the problem was that the btcentralplus.com. domain was not being listed against my credentials as a valid relay domain.

I then gave you the key information that would have allowed an engineer to resolve this problem. I wrote:

” It may be that this is because my BT Internet email address pre-existed the broadband connection”.

Other than an automated acknowledgement, no reply was ever received to this email.

Eventual Resolution

As BT were not talking to me, I continued my investigations. I noted that there was no huge outcry on Usenet about the failure of BT’s SMTP service, so I presumed that this problem only affected me or a small user group. I considered what was special about my BT account.

One thing that was special was that we have had a BT dialup account for a very long time. Long enough that we retained the five free email address service from our BT anytime account. Recently BT have extended this service to all customers, but it was a service we already had.

However it occurred to me that the automated registration system may treat my account differently from newer accounts with this service, and that you may have reconfigured your SMTP service to disallow the older accounts, or maybe my credentials were simply damaged in your database and needed refreshing.

I thus “upgraded” my account from the existing “five free email address” service to the exact same service! This will have pushed new versions of my credentials around the BT Internet network, and sure enough after a short pause, the SMTP service started authenticating from our broadband IP address once again.

Conclusion

It is now Friday 3rd February. BT have not followed up on my original fault report, nor on my email query. I have managed to resolve my own problem, but only through an in depth knowledge of how these services work. If we had followed your advice, we would now be talking with Microsoft!

I am extremely unhappy with this experience, and have noted various lessons that I believe BT must learn.

As a BT shareholder I am unhappy that you appear to be turning away a large part of your potential user base through your “outlook express only” policy. I am also unhappy that your failure to address such support issues is presumably turning away other customers. I myself am now considering looking for an alternative ISP.

I would like the following undertakings from BT:

1. To refund my call costs for my support call on Sunday Evening;
2. pass on my resolution of your fault to your call centre as soon as possible, so that others affected by this fault can be told quickly how to resolve it;
3. To address the failures in your technical support centre, to ensure that in future, genuine technical issues can be passed onto someone more knowledgeable more quickly. I would like BT to tell me how they intend to achieve this;
4. To ensure that the failure to return calls and emails is addressed;
5. To provide support for cross platform mailers - e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird, and also for text mailers and those used by people with visual difficulties.

I look forward to your considered reply.

Yours faithfully