Daisy support

A few days ago, on Monday, I got an email from Daisy to tell me that my leased-line connection to the internet was misbehaving. "Flapping", which means, I think, intermittent connection. On the same day, and before I'd seen that email, I contacted them to report a fault - I was seeing intermittent connection to the internet.

The replied by telling me that they couldn't see any packet loss, and asked for "a trace-route to highlight the packet loss". So I sent them the results of a ping test, showing 11% packet loss. Later ping tests showed 30%, and eventually 50% packet loss. That's a severely bad line.

They came back with a graph, and the statement that "the packet loss you are experiencing is due to maximum bandwidth utilization". The graph showed max utilisation for a bit over one hour, and that was the hour when I do my across-the-internet backup. The rest of the graph showed less than 10% utilisation, yet I was still getting packet loss.

Daisy's suggestion was that I upgrade my connection. Or, to put it another way, spend twice as much money with them for a connection that wasn't working properly and still wouldn't be working after the upgrade.

So I explained this to them. They came back with the suggestion "check that you have re-seated the Serial cable and that it is firmly connected". I did that, it was. Also, rebooting the router had no useful result.

By this time, it was three days after I reported the fault (a fault that their own monitoring had also alerted them to). So I escalated the problem - I called Sales and asked them to administer a nudge to their technical people. Because what's the point of paying big bucks for a leased line (which has the main advantage of high reliability) when it's performing a lot worse than a £15 broadband?

That got a result. I got a call from their NOC (Network Operations Center) to tell me that they've discovered a fault on the line, and they were telling Vodafone. Who have now purchased my leased-line from Cable and Wireless, who bought it from ... you don't want the full history, but I've changed suppliers so many times now (without me actually making the change) that I sometimes forget who I need to call to report problems. And they were also going to send out an engineer to replace my venerable 1700 router with a spiffy new 1800, just in case that was part of the problem. I said I'd be in all day.

At 6pm, I got a call from the engineer; he was having trouble finding the site. I have no idea why they don't issue their roving staff with satnavs; that would have found me, using the post code. He was phoning from a nearby golf club, and I gave him directions. And then I told him "Daisy mentioned to me that they were cancelling the engineer visit", because Vodafone say they've found the fault and a BT engineer has fixed it.

Loose wire, I expect. Or a squirrel nibbled the cable.

So the engineer called Daisy, who confirmed that they've cancelled the visit.

And it looks like my line is back to 100%, hurrah!

So now I'm asking Daisy, how come it took them three days to do something that actually took, once they got serious about it, a couple of hours?

And then the courier arrived, delivering the router that their engineer will not now be installing.