22.15: Fourth post of the day

This last week has not been entirely devoid of good news. At least not for me. Thanks to a little bit of serendipity, I’ve solved the problem of my grossly underperforming ADSL line. The saga is recorded in the following paragraphs. Telefonica has never been a popular company with me and they emerge from this tale with even less credit than I expected. If, by some miracle, they have someone in something like a Customer Relations Department trawling the web for badwill stories, I’d be delighted to hear their response.

So, this is exclusively for anyone in Spain who’s got an ADSL line from someone other than Telefonica and who’s having problems because, according to Telefonica, there’s a malfunctioning bucle in the centralita. Or for any other reason they’ve been given by Telefonica, for that matter. . . .

I’ve had weeks of hassle with Telefonica over an ADSL line giving me only 10% of the speed I’m paying Ya.com for. Telefonica visited my house, confirmed the line was very poor, cut the line, pretended to work on it for 5 hours outside and finally identified the problem as a ‘bad loop [bucle] in the central exchange [centralita]’. They said they would fix this if I changed to their ADSL service. Otherwise, basically, I could go to hell, even though both I and Ya.com were paying them for a good line.

I have discovered the malfunctioning bucle is not in the central exchange but in the principal phone socket in my garage. Technically – and briefly – older lines have a PCR and what is needed is a PTR. You can find these terms on Wikipedia in Spanish. The PCR has in it a diagnostic tool which feeds back data to Telefonica. This interferes with an ADSL line and so PCRs are no longer installed. If you have a PCR, you have to change it for a PTR, which looks exactly the same. Since the box is the property of Telefonica, theoretically only they should do this. But they clearly won’t move a muscle unless you switch your ADSL line to them. This is certainly immoral and possibly illegal, as being in breach of their contract with you. So you might want to consider using someone else.

Here is a photo of the circuit board of my obsolete PCR. The bucle is the thin black box. I think. This is where the diagnostic tool is.