BT/Openreach - a private monopoly in action

[Guest Alphonsox]

Or why your line rental costs £20 per month.....

 

In the dim past of 2014 as we were planning ground works we contacted Openreach to discuss putting in a phone line.Their surveyor came to look at the site. "No problem" he said, Just run a conduit plus cable from the house to a point on the boundry 0.5M from the road box and we'll do the rest.

 

Back in January this year I decided to conect the phone and broadband connection into the new build. For various reasons this needs/needed to happen by the end of March - I called BT explained the situation, told them the cable was exactly where they had requested it, they were happy, I placed the order. The engineer will arrive on the 8th March to do the final connection, what can possibly go wrong ?

 

8th March -  We stay in as requested, the engineer arrives "to install phone line", stays 5 minutes, then leaves saying a further survey will be required and a separate road team will be required to clear the manhole cover. It's clear that no preperation work has been done prior to this date at all.

We contact BT again and request completion by the end of the month (Monopoly 1, Customer 0).

15th March - The survey is reported as complete, A "pair divert" will be required further up the line, planned date available.

We contact BT again and request completion by the end of the month (Monopoly 2, Customer 0).

16th March - Road team arrive to dig out manhole cover, but tell us they "dont do electrical bits", we'll need to contact BT to find out more. They leave.

We contact BT again and request completion by the end of the month (Monopoly 3 Customer 0).

23rd March - Network work is complete, "Engineer will arrive on Monday" to connect the house to the roadbox - Happy days, they've obviously been listening to us and are clearly  a competent customer facing organisation (Monopoly 3 Customer 1).

26th March - The engineer arrives (contractor) and installs master socket, but "cant lift this type of manhole cover" on his own, It's a two man lift. He calls in a friend. Jointly they decide it's still too heavy. They decide a mechanical lift device is required but they don't have one, neither does their company. "BT will be in touch". (Monopoly 4 Customer 1)

27th March -

• 9:30 Van1 appears, It's the BT engineer with the mechanical lift kit. He informs me that as we are on a road with a theoretical 60mph speed limit he needs to either use traffic lights (Which he hasn't got on the van)  or get special permission to proceed. I point out that this the middle of nowhere and despite it being rush hour he is more likely to be harmed by one of the stropy local seagulls than encounter a vehicle. He phones control and is allowed to proceed,  He lifts the manhole cover revealing some form of sealed junction - "i'm not qualified to touch that". He calls a friend.
•     10:00 - Van2 appears. Engineer 1 and Engineer2 peer into the hole.

•     10:15 - Van2 leaves

•     10:30 - Car1 appears. Some signage is placed on the road to inform the seagulls there are roadworks taking place.

•      10:45 -Car1 leaves,

•      11:45 - Van2 reappears

•      12::00 - Van3 appears

•      12:30 - Car1 reappears, so we now have 3 vans, 1 car and 4 engineers. More vehicles than the road has seen since the last tractor rally. This is starting to look hopeful.

•      15:00 - All still there enjoying the sunshine. A neighbour stops to ask if the presence of three vans all marked "Superfast Broadband" mean that fibre has eventually made it to this corner of Northern Ireland. He leaves disappointed.

•      15:30 - They all vanish without a word.

•      16:00 - I plug in a phone, There's a dial tone. I plug in a router, We have broadband Hurrah!! (Monopoly 4 Customer 2)

28th March - We bask in the joy of a 1.7Mb/s internet connection. Strangly the BT account still says waiting for activation on the 30th. That's got to be a simple delay in the system.... (Monopoly 4 Customer 3 )

29 March - It's all fine until 9:30 when everything dies. I check the order online, the activation date has now moved out to the middle of April.

• We contact BT and remind them that we needed a connection by the end of the month.
• They tell us an update may be available on the 3rd (Monopoly 5 Customer 3 )
• We contact BT and tell them that we needed a connection by the end of the month.
• They tell us an update should be available on the 3rd (Monopoly 6 Customer 3 )
• We contact BT and tell them we will cancel if they can't conform we will have a connection by the end of the month
• They tell us an update will be available on the 3rd (Monopoly 7 Customer 3 )
• We cancel

 

So to recap - 3 years since the survey, 2 months since the order was placed, 8 separate visits to the property and all for a 0.5m cable connection.  I reckon a compentent private sector company would have done this in 2-3 visits to a mutually agreeable timescale without issue.

 

I have wasted so much time trying to sort this out, I should have stuck with vodafone....

 

 

[nod]

They are an absolute nightmare 

[lizzie]

I feel for you....been through the BT nightmare recently although not as extreme as yours.

 

They are without doubt the worst company and most stressful to deal with.

 

Hope you get sorted..........I eventually got.mine escalated by posting on their facebook page....repeatedly .....until they responded with a dedicated person (and her direct phone contact number) to deal with things and get it sorted. Sometimes the power of social media can help.

[Guest Alphonsox]

5 minutes ago, lizzie said:

I feel for you....been through the BT nightmare recently although not as extreme as yours.

 

They are without doubt the worst company and most stressful to deal with.

 

Hope you get sorted..........I eventually got.mine escalated by posting on their facebook page....repeatedly .....until they responded with a dedicated person (and her direct phone contact number) to deal with things and get it sorted. Sometimes the power of social media can help.

 

If only I hadn't just deleted my Facebook account.......

 

 

[ProDave]

Been there, done that and posted the saga at the time.

 

What I did also notice through a lot of peering into water filled man holes, is what a decrepit, fragile, 19th century network it is. It's a wonder it works at all for voice telephony let alone (slow) broadband.

[Guest Alphonsox]

25 minutes ago, ProDave said:

Been there, done that and posted the saga at the time.

 

What I did also notice through a lot of peering into water filled man holes, is what a decrepit, fragile, 19th century network it is. It's a wonder it works at all for voice telephony let alone (slow) broadband.

 

Agreed - I initialy questioned why I could only get a 1Mb/s link, having peared into the hole (along with the 4 other engineers) I can only assume some form of black magic is involved. It makes the day job - A few GHz across a cm or so of silicon - look trivial.

[ProDave]

We only got barely 1 MB when our new line was connected. We were getting about 2 at the old house.  I do remember one of the many "engineers" muttering about there was only 1 "good" pair left in the cable coming down our road (and one pair that tested as dud)

 

Anyway after a few weeks, I complained about the speed. A much younger and much more clued up engineer attended and he traced the line through the 4 joint boxes just to get to the top of our road. Every joint box he opened was full of water, and by cleaning up and re making all the connections, he had got the speed up to about 3.5MB by the time he left.

 

Your dialing tone and internet for a few minutes was probably someone elses line.  During the 3 week saga of getting our connection made, one day they said the connection to the exchange was made, then they were back next day because what they thought was a spare pair was someone elses leased line and they of course complained when it stopped working.

[Hecateh]

Oh ffs sake - I haven't even looked at this yet

Tomorrow is Bank Holiday etc etc - so that is Tuesday's job

 

[Trw144]

Sounds exactly like my story at my old house - took 8 months, unknown amounts of visits, to connect make my 30cm connection.

 

 

[Gone West]

We never even got as far as having Openreach engineers doing anything. We decided that with all the hassle we had trying to get the surveyors to agree to what we wanted, we didn't have a landline installed at all. There are alternatives.

[daiking]

9 hours ago, ProDave said:

 

Your dialing tone and internet for a few minutes was probably someone elses line.  During the 3 week saga of getting our connection made, one day they said the connection to the exchange was made, then they were back next day because what they thought was a spare pair was someone elses leased line and they of course complained when it stopped working.

 

I think I posted this just before Xmas but one night our internet stop working but the phone seemed to work. Short story is that someone in a van had come out, fiddled with the phone lines and swapped my phone line with a neighbours. You called my number they answered, you calle their number, we answered.

 

Despite this being something we checked and proved was happening the man in a van who came to fix it disnt believe us. Until he climbed the pole and checked it whatever and discovered that had actually happened.

 

and another thing, buildhub should be funded via the equivalent of a swear jar for the inappropriate use of the term engineer. This thread alone would pay the hosting bill for a few months 

[Guest Alphonsox]

On 30/03/2018 at 09:06, daiking said:

and another thing, buildhub should be funded via the equivalent of a swear jar for the inappropriate use of the term engineer. This thread alone would pay the hosting bill for a few months 

 

You're on a loser with this one - The practise of engineering is not and has never been a regulated profesion in the UK, regardless of what some us would prefer it to be.

[Jeremy Harris]

I'm pretty sure I've never heard anyone praise BT Openreach here, or on Ebuild.  Their management is the main problem I found; once I found the mobile number for the chap that looked after our local area he was great, and bent over backwards to help, but even he was thwarted several times by his own managers. 

 

An example, the local chap had managed to get all the duct, cable, hockey sticks, cast iron boxes, etc delivered to our site, as I'd agreed that we would run all the cables for them, as we already had trenches open where they needed to go.  He suggested we leave long lengths of cable coiled up at the poles at either end of our site, ready to be connected, which we did.  When we couldn't get the connection team out to take down an overhead cable that was in the way and connect the new cable we had laid, the local chap's solution was simple,  He told us to "accidentally" snag the overhead cable with a digger first thing the next morning, then call his number. 

 

We did this and a connection team arrived within half an hour.  They took one look at the coils of wire waiting to be connected, and the broken wire, muttered that this was "another (name of local chap)  job" and made the connections within half an hour, including the run up to our house external junction box.  Apparently this was the only way to get the connection team to do anything on time, as they are required to fix broken lines ASAP, so this job goes to the top of the list.  From what I could gather it was a fairly common tactic used to get jobs to the top of the priority list.

 

All told, I first contacted BT Openreach in January, got a chap out on site within a week or so to look at the work involved, agreed we needed the work done in June and finally got it done some time in August.  The DNO were slightly better, we paid them in full in April, agreed a date for the work in June and they also eventually got around to doing the work in August.

[Guest Alphonsox]

I think the managagent is lacking, but equally there is a complete lack of joined up thinking. I would have expected that the first survey back in 2014 should have noted

- The type of road box and whether lifting gear would be required to gain access.

- The type of junction arrangement within the box and whether specialist gear would be required to make the connection.

- The type of road (30/40/60 mph) and whether traffic lights would be required.

This information should have been imediately available to whomever co-ordinates the teams in the field to ensure the correct team is sent. Instead each team had to work this out for themselves on arival.

Equally I would have expected work to start when the order was placed, we effectively lost 6 weeks due to inactivity from Openreach.

 

 

[richi]

12 hours ago, Alphonsox said:

I can only assume some form of black magic is involved.

 

I have some training in information theory. I can assure you that xDSL is much closer to alchemy. However, the new gigabit (ish) G.fast is the purest witchcraft.

 

Mind you, I always maintained V.90 56K modems were impossible, so what would I know?

[Guest Alphonsox]

I used to design digital QAM modulators for Philips phones many moons ago so have a good understanding of the underlying theory - But there's a big disconnect between the theory and a dark muddy hole in the ground on the edge of a road in rainy Northern Ireland.

[richi]

2 minutes ago, Alphonsox said:

there's a big disconnect between the theory and a dark muddy hole in the ground on the edge of a road in rainy Northern Ireland.

 

And then there are the rules-of-thumb that trip people up all the time.

 

Case in point: My phone line is almost 3 km long, yet I achieve a consistent, low-error-rate 17.5 Mb/s ADSL2+ downstream sync. I've lost count of the number of keyboard jockeys, ISP reps, and OpenReach engineers who've told me that's simply impossible and I've either misread the speed or my line isn't anywhere near that long.

[Jeremy Harris]

19 minutes ago, richi said:

 

And then there are the rules-of-thumb that trip people up all the time.

 

Case in point: My phone line is almost 3 km long, yet I achieve a consistent, low-error-rate 17.5 Mb/s ADSL2+ downstream sync. I've lost count of the number of keyboard jockeys, ISP reps, and OpenReach engineers who've told me that's simply impossible and I've either misread the speed or my line isn't anywhere near that long.

 

 

By contrast, I have a ~1.5km long copper pair connected via FTTC and VDSL 2 and struggle to get better than 4 to 5 Mb/s.

[Guest Alphonsox]

7 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

 

 

By contrast, I have a ~1.5km long copper pair connected via FTTC and VDSL 2 and struggle to get better than 4 to 5 Mb/s.

 

It willl be interesting to see how the 10Mb/s universal service obligation plays out.

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/03/government-details-final-10mbps-for-all-uk-broadband-uso-design.html

 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

If the price was reasonable, I'd be prepared to pay a one-off charge for FTTP, especially as, geographically, I'm only around 400m from a fibre enabled cabinet with loads of spare (unfilled) slots in it.  It's just a matter of running the fibre along a row of poles and through our conduit, really. 

 

Our problem with the copper loop is that it runs in the opposite direction to the cabinet for a few hundred metres, then doubles back.  It doesn't need to, there are now a row of poles directly along the lane from the cabinet to our house, it's just the hodge-podge way the system developed as the village expanded.  BT, or it's predecessor GPT Telephones, ran the main trunk cable up the wrong one of the two lanes that fork out of the village and village development stopped on the lane they selected and switched to run along the other lane instead.  If they just re-routed the main trunk cable up the "right" lane we'd probably get three to four times the speed we get now, even on FTTC.
 

[Jeremy Harris]

This last exchange about speed, plus a chit through the post today telling me that they have just doubled my upload speed (which seems true, I've just run another test and  can now almost get 2 Mb/s upload, but only 3.9 Mb/s download) has spurred me to complain (again) about our really poor fibre broadband performance. 

 

Last time I complained nothing happened and the state of the copper loop from BT was blamed.  Given that there will be an obligation in a couple of years to give me at least 10 Mb/s download (bearing in mind that I'm paying for an "up to 38 Mb/s" service), it will be interesting to see how they respond this time.  Last time I complained nothing happened, so I don't hold out a lot of hope, especially as I'm with Plusnet, who are owned by BT.................

[richi]

2 hours ago, JSHarris said:

Last time I complained nothing happened, so I don't hold out a lot of hope, especially as I'm with Plusnet

 

Best way to get someone's attention (other than the 1st-level CSC team) is posting at https://community.plus.net/t5/Fibre-Broadband/bd-p/Fibre 

 

If your post doesn't get any substantive attention from a Plusnet expert, mention a superuser, such as Townman and ask for an escalation.

[RichS]

3 hours ago, JSHarris said:

This last exchange about speed, plus a chit through the post today telling me that they have just doubled my upload speed (which seems true, I've just run another test and  can now almost get 2 Mb/s upload, but only 3.9 Mb/s download) has spurred me to complain (again) about our really poor fibre broadband performance. 

 

Last time I complained nothing happened and the state of the copper loop from BT was blamed.  Given that there will be an obligation in a couple of years to give me at least 10 Mb/s download (bearing in mind that I'm paying for an "up to 38 Mb/s" service), it will be interesting to see how they respond this time.  Last time I complained nothing happened, so I don't hold out a lot of hope, especially as I'm with Plusnet, who are owned by BT.................

 

If Plusnet are owned by BT how come their mobile network uses EE, or  is that owned by BT as well?

[RichS]

Ignore the above question. I've just Googled it and apparently EE is part of the BT group

[willbish]

A guy poked his head over the site hoarding today offering FTTP. This sounded interesting..

He's from a small company who have brought fibre to homes in other near by villages and is now recruiting in my area. 

Apparently just 13 more sign ups and it's a goer, well 12 now! 

Having already been around the BT/Openreach circle twice (New housing development - unable to place order - bronze matching address service Aaaaaaah ?) this is a welcome development.

There is no upfront fee, but an 18 month contract which you start paying only when you start using. It's not cheap at £47.50 a month but guaranteed 200mbs up and down at all times. 

The company is Truespeed, there may well be something similar happening in your area and a welcome alternative to the BT/ Openreach monopoly that I could tell was going to cause me a load of headache for a crappy copper drop wire!