Getting the phone connected at my new house...

[ProDave]

This gets more rediculous

 

So I had previously been told the job has been delayed until WB 27th March

 

Today (remember today was supposed to be my connection day) I had not long got home when SWMBO tells me there's an Open Reach van driving up and down the road. Sure enough he's looking for the new house.  He's fitted the socket inside the house.  Dug a hole in the grass verge and located the cable we need to join to. He told me it should be a simple job, just enlarge the connection pit and make the connection, then make a connection in the joint box up the road.

 

Then the bombshell.  Because the joint box at the top of the road is right next to the road, it needs traffic lights. He will have to put in a request which will need a traffic light permit and that usually takes 2 weeks.

 

FFS  the guy that came on 1st March must have known that is where they would have to do the work. Surely it would not have been beyond the whit of man to order the traffic lights in advance?

 

And what happened to all the complications that "delayed" the job?

 

And this is from a "communication" company.

[Stones]

@ProDave

 

Did you email the Chief Exec?  If you haven't already, I would now.  Not that it's much consolation, you will be entitled to some paltry compensation from your original install date.

[ProDave]

I did send that email, and he has tried to help, but to be honest, all he is able to do is keep me informed with what is going on, and from today's episode even he does not know what is going on. He doesn't seem able to do anything to hasten things along.

[Stones]

If nothing else, should at the very least keep you updated.  I share your pain...

[ProDave]

I'll complete this thread with how it panned out, though strictly it's not "finished" yet.

 

So we were waiting for traffic lights to access the awkward junction box. I was originally told "up to 2 weeks" for those.  While waiting I took Stone's advice and raised a complaint about how the install was being handled. I was allocated a complaint manager. I soon found his task was just to try and placate me and keep me happy and informed. I do not believe he ever did a single thing to speed anything up.  Anyway, he told me the traffic lights were booked for 17th April and there was absolutely nothing he could do to speed that up.  Note that date. I didn't realise at the time but that was Easter Monday Bank holiday.

 

So while waiting and fuming, something else happened. We moved out of our old house and into the static caravan on our building site. No we haven't sold the old house, we have implemented "plan B" and the old house is now let.  So that left us in the 'van with only a poor mobile phone signal and no interned. So if you wonder why I have not been on the forum much for a few weeks.....

 

Anyway on 12th April, unexpected, the traffic lights appeared. They sat there from 9AM holding up the traffic until OR eventually turned up at mid day. By the time they took the lights away at 3PM they had done the connection in that awkward junction box. But that was not the end of it. That only got a line from half way down our road, to about 3Km towards town. It took 2 more days, until mid day on Friday before they had pieced together a working line from our house to the exchange. Note that was Good Friday, a Bank hoiday, but they still seemed to be working.

 

Lesson 1. Do not believe any date given to you even by your complaints manager.

 

So we had a connection. so the line will be on very soon?  NO. The OR engineer departed at mid day on Friday saying "I will submit the request for connection when I get back to the exchange"  My complaints manager could do nothing to speed it up, pointing out the Bank holiday issue, saying it could be up to a week to get connected.

 

Lesson 2:  Open Reach as an organisation know nothing about project management, and the concept of getting the stuff ready in the exchange in parallel to the line work so it could be activated as soon as the line was complete, is obviously something they have never even considered.

 

Wednesday 24th I get a call from the complaints manager. Your line is active.  I was out at the time, so I phoned SWMBO to ask her to go and check the phone and then the broadband.  Sure enough the phone line was working, but no broadband.  Back on the blower to the complaints manager. Ah yes, you ordered just a line to start with, and added the broadband to the order a week later. That will be treated as an upgrade, and the broadband won't be ordered until the line work is complete. That can take up to 2 weeks.  Yes of course I blew my top at him. again. 

 

Thursday the complaints manager phones me to say the broadband will be active next Wednesday.  Then, half an hour later, I noticed the broadband light on the router was on, and we now have broadband.

 

The closing bit of incompetence was then on Friday, I had a phone call from someone else at BT followed up with an email. telling me our broadband would be acivated on 8th May. I didn't dare tell hime it wa already active in case they realise their mistake and turn it off again.

 

Lesson 3. considering they are a communications company, Open Reach and BT have the worst communication I have ever come across and you simply cannot believe anything they tell you.

 

Still some "issues" to sort out next week with the complaints manager, one being the very slow speed "broadband" It's barely making 1Mbps download. The previous house, 100 metres further from the exchange was almost reaching 2 Mbps and we considered that slow.

 

[Stones]

Has your complaints manager mentioned compensation as yet?

[ProDave]

10 minutes ago, Stones said:

Has your complaints manager mentioned compensation as yet?

Hr said that's a topic we will address once the line and broadband is complete, so on the agenda for this week I believe.

[PeterW]

50 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Hr said that's a topic we will address once the line and broadband is complete, so on the agenda for this week I believe.

 

I got 6 months broadband out of them for a complete cock up of being unable to use the broadband unless you made a phone call first ... This was business too - think I got about £180 back. 

[ProDave]

Well a result.

 

I finally got them to address he poor BB speed issue. This evening an OR engineer arrived (he had driven up from Hartlepool this morning!!!!!)

 

He has only just left after spending 3 hours working on our line, pulling all the junction boxes apart, re making connections etc.

 

When he arrived we had barely 0.9Mbps We now have 3.5Mbps, faster even than we ever got at the old house.  Many of you will be thinking "gosh that's slow" but to us out in the sticks, that's fast.

 

Just the compensation matter, now the technicalities are at last sorted out.

[Gone West]

10 hours ago, ProDave said:

 

Many of you will be thinking "gosh that's slow" but to us out in the sticks, that's fast.

 

How very true.

[jack]

11 hours ago, ProDave said:

He has only just left after spending 3 hours working on our line, pulling all the junction boxes apart, re making connections etc.

 

Were these recently installed connections he was re-making?  

 

The difficulty with Openreach is that they are focused on business to business transactions.  While they should in theory be able to work with self-builders, they're fundamentally focused on phone/internet providers, and large scale development.  Self-builders are such a small group relative to their normal activity that they just don't seem to be able to make it work for them.

 

Also, it was explained to me that if you already have a phone line (as we did, since we knocked down and rebuilt), you shouldn't be directly in contact with Openreach anyway.  Reconnection of an existing line should be arranged via your phone/internet provider, who will get Openreach involved themselves.  The problem with this is that if you can't speak to Openreach, you can't ask questions about how they want you to set things up for them, and lord knows most phone company people wouldn't have a clue.  We had the ridiculous situation of having the get an Openreach guy onsite to do the installation when we knew very well it wasn't ready, because we just couldn't get BT to relay a simple question to Openreach.

 

Got there in the end, but it was a stretch.

 

I found Sky Broadband worse during this period.  It turned out that my wife accidentally didn't disconnect our broadband, so we were paying for a year despite not having a phone line.  When I rang them to discuss this, they agreed that they could see we hadn't had a connection for over a year, but refused to refund a penny of what we'd paid.  Apparently we were paying for the "right" to use the broadband, and if we chose not to use it that was our fault.  I get their point legally, but this seemed hugely short-sighted from a customer retention point of view (especially given that acquisition is the hardest part of the process for broadband providers).  I will never under any circumstances consider using them again.

Edited May 3, 2017 by jack
Clarified last paragraph

[Bitpipe]

Here's my suggestion (based on personal experience) - don't tie yourself in knots trying to get hold of OR in advance, it's practically impossible.

 

Firstly, just call up BT, act dumb and order a new line - their operatives can't seem to deal with anything complicated, so just keep it nice and simple. Make sure you get a deal where the install is free (usually involves taking broadband).

 

Then, when the OR team comes out to do the work, you can corner them and understand what really needs to happen on site. They should then get the surveyor to come out and you'll get a proper quotations plus a recommendation on what pre-work you can do yourself (in our case, trenching across road and pulling through cable), some may even give you supplies of duct & cable but this seems to be rarer now, in any case it's not expensive stuff (try TLC). You may need to cancel that original BT order and wait a few weeks for it to clear from the OR system depending on what they advise. This should incur no cost.

 

Then, when the prep on your site is done, just call up BT, act dumb and order a new line...

[jack]

1 hour ago, Bitpipe said:

... act dumb...

 

Just act like whoever you're talking to at BT.  I don't think I've ever spoken to a single person there who understood anything they were reading from the flowchart.

 

Me: "Hi, our broadband isn't working.  I've tried resetting the router but I'm standing beside it and the red light is still on."

 

BT: "Thank you for calling BT.  First, could you please check that the router is plugged in."

 

Me: "AAAaaaaarrrghh!!"

[ProDave]

You don't need to act dumb when talking to BT, they act dumb enough for everybody to share a bit of dumbness.

 

Re the bad connections, they were old ones. Basically running down our road is one 20 pair cable as far as the big submerged junction box. From there it splits to two houses by that junction box, then carries on down the road as a 10 pair cable.  For some odd reason there are two junctions in this chamber, with about a metre of cable between them.  As far as I can tell all pairs were connected in all cables. then to compound it, a few years back there was a line fault, and a portion of the cable was replaced and a new junction pit installed where the new section met the old.

 

So when they came to connect us it was a case of find an unused pair, of which there were two, and the first one he tested was "faulty" so we had the only good one left.

 

the Engineer who came yesterday, who I have to say was streets ahead of the original one, re made a lot of connections in this one junction pit. He said they all looked pretty ropey and corroded so as well as re terminating ours, he did another half a dozen of the worst looking, so he may well have improved the braodband of others in the street.

 

He then ran some tests on the line and said the signal is somewhat weak and put in a request to change the exchange end to a different profile.

 

Today a speed test tells me we have blisteringly fast 4Mbps download.

 

It just makes you wonder how many people are suffering with poor broadband, and if they cared to complain and get it looked at, by taking the trouble to make sure all connections are good, running some tests and selecting the correct profile at the exchange end made a huge improvement.  I guess they just can't be bothered to give that level of care unless you make a fuss.

[Bitpipe]

When we were in the caravan, the broadband went a bit flakey. The modem was in the site office and we were using power line plugs to squirt it to the van.

 

BT came out and it turned out that one wire in the pair was broken but making an occasional connection - apparently this was enough to keep the broadband live but the associated voice line (which I never used) was dead. Still trying to figure out how that worked...