Your ISP almost certainly knows a lot more about your connection than you do, thanks to a little-known service that BT Wholesale offers to its broadband providers called the Reactive Repair Tool. With this service, the ISP's support staff can simply punch your telephone number into a website and see a detailed history of your line's maximum and average speed, faults and uptime over the past fortnight. "The service uses historic-line speed data to profile lines and learn what's gone on previously," according to BT Wholesale's Ashley Pickering.
The technician can, for example, look at a week-long chart of your connection with each hour split into coloured
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blocks: green showing when the connection is achieving expected speeds and red blocks indicating times when speeds slumped or suffered from above-normal levels of electrical interference. "The ISP can get a pattern, hour-by-hour, of where problems start," said Pickering. This is stunningly useful for diagnosing hard-to-pin-down problems. If over the course of a week the Repair Tool reveals that the connection slumped between 5 and 6pm every night, the ISP can share that information with its customer and attempt to identify a potential cause: it could be the time the central heating is set to switch on, for example, or the time the satellite box is normally turned on for the early evening news. Not all ISPs have access to the Reactive Repair Tool, but it's well worth asking your tech support desk if they do before contemplating more drastic solutions to connection problems, such as rewiring the house or replacing a router.
