Phone outage since 20th December.

Question

I've had an unusable phone line since 20th December extremely loud crackling, unable to make or receive calls, sometimes no dial tone at all. This fault is intermittently affecting my broadband which, being FTTC, indicates a fault my side of the cabinet.  I ran the line test which decided that the fault was in the network and an engineer was booked. 
I had a call after a day or so to tell me that, what with the holiday period and bad weather, they wouldn;t be avle to get to me until the 31st. OK I was happy with that as I was not working during that period. 
31st December and the engineer duly arrived. Ran line tests from the master socket and said the fault was 130m away. He went for a walk and when he came back he said he couldn't find a cabinet at that distance. He went out again for a while and eventually told me he'd found an upstream cabinet with some rather corroded connections which he cleaned. We checked the line and it seemed to work. So far, so good. He left.
I was away from home for New Year but discovered that same afternoon that I could not connect to my home broadband and that I could not call my house; the call being diverted straight to BT Answer.
On 1st Jan, I had a follow up call from Connor who told me he had discovered the same thing and that he'd report it as not fixed. It ought to be looked at within 3 days.
Today I chased up the fault and had a very frustrating conversation with a support technician who told me that the fault had magically moved into my premises, and read a long spiel on how much it might cost me if the fault is mine. OK this is rather threatening but I'm secure in the knowledge that the only two items connected to the master socket is my cordless phone base station and the BT-supplied Infinity VDSL modem.
The engineer instructed me to unscrew the front plate and connect my phone directly to the engineer's socket; the fault still existed. Still the engineer insisted his “diagnostic software” was able to detect that the fault was inside my premises and therefore he coudl only offer me an appointment of the 14th January. That's 45 days from the first report!
All I want is to get the OpenReach engineer to have another go at finding the fault he detected 130m from my house, perhaps coming armed with the local cabinet location.
How can I get the engineer to return? I work at home and, while I have 3G backup for my internet connection, it is extremely disrupting to have to keep switching over when the network dies, in addition to the obvious difficulty in having no phone connection.

Answer 1

Hello,
I sent you a private message to see what we can do to resolve your trouble. Please check when you have a moment,
Shamika_Vz
Verizon Support
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