British Telecom's capacity for incompetence continues to amaze me. We're reproduced the fault in their L2TP service using purely Legacy IP — although we first saw it with IPv6, it does affect IPv4 too.

It's a known Cisco bug — CSCsd13298, for which a patch exists. And yet they still seem incapable of dealing with it.

They've tried sending engineers to my house, as if they think that could help. I turned him away with an explanation of what the problem really was, and then they put false information into the ticket: "SFI Line tested ok following attendance by BT external engineer". The engineer didn't get anywhere near it; he was turned away at the door.

They've tried charging for a "Special Faults Investigation" engineer visit, despite clearly being instructed that such a visit was not requested. This is an offence under the Unsolicited Goods and Services Act, 1971.

This update from their side is particularly impressive:

No BTW fault - an engineer attended on 15/10/2008 23:40:00 and reported reterminated e side to b/pair 17070 all ok fast test done = line test ok. Notes and test results indicate no fault exists.

If there was an engineer in our house at twenty to midnight on Wednesday, he was very quiet. And he managed to complete his work without disturbing the DSL line, which has remained synchronised from Wednesday morning until now without interruption.

They've even tried just closing the ticket without fixing it, in what seems to be just a fraudulent attempt to evade the SLA.

It's astonishing to watch the exchanges back and forth between BT and the ISP on the fault ticket, with complete lies being put forth from BT in clearing the ticket, and then being rejected by the ISP.

Why on earth can they not just fix their poxy Cisco kit? (Or preferably retire it in favour of machines from someone less incompetent, like Juniper; but that's more of a long-term plan).

Fucking Useless, Criminal, Telco.