Openreach want to charge for not being able to find a fault

AndyPK

I can’t believe genuinely 80% if faults are in the house.
That is just not logical.
They must be pulling a fast one.

JJ_Egan

That was the second / third time in a year i asked a BT OR tech and REIN guys .
What is the most common fault .
Both same reply .
Basically old wiring / extensions .
WiFi
Facebook :cool:
No problems outside of Master Socket.
Even if it was to high at 80% posts on here show users blame ISP first .That can lead to potential OR charges .

AndyPK

when you think a lot of houses have maybe 1 foot of wiring to the master socket, (generally in nice dry conditions) and the rest of the cable to the exchange is 5 miles under ground, laid decades ago, sometimes flood, thru boxes constantly being opened to switch peoples lines, I know where I would expect most of the faults to be!

Open reach just trying to make money!

onomatopoeia99

AndyPK wrote: »

when you think a lot of houses have maybe 1 foot of wiring to the master socket, (generally in nice dry conditions) and the rest of the cable to the exchange is 5 miles under ground, laid decades ago, sometimes flood, thru boxes constantly being opened to switch peoples lines, I know where I would expect most of the faults to be!

Open reach just trying to make money!

On FTTC the cable only goes back to the cabinet, and if on ADSL, five miles would be right on the edge of working at all.


Methinks you are exagerating :j



My own experience of an intermittent fault. I had a dozen visits for intermittent broadband disconnects of 90 seconds or so each in rain and high wind. Most were "no fault found", one resulted in the cable from the top of the pole to the cabinet being replaced as there was a fault in it, and the final one led to the dropwire being replaced, something previous technicians (OR don't send engineers out to repair phone lines) had told me might need doing as it was very old even though no fault was showing, but was going to be impossible due to not being able to get the hoist over to where it joined my property.



It only got fixed at all because my ISP threatened BT wholesale with legal action for non-performance of contract in failing to supply me with a working MPF. Then somehow OR found a crew of a couple of old boys that didn't seem to think much of health and safety at work regulations and found they could work the hoist and get it into position to do the job.


What did I get charged for all those "no fault found" visits? Nothing, nada, zilch. Maybe because I use a proper ISP, maybe because the OR technicians looked at my master socket, observed the data cabinet, patch panel, switch and mass of cat5e structured cabling and realised "customer's internal wiring" wasn't going to work as an explanation, or maybe because towards the end they were daunted by the pages and pages of notes on my file they needed to read through when they were assigned the job - one even called me before arriving and said "I've been given the job and looked at the notes and there's no point me coming out, I can't fix it" :rotfl: - who knows.



The ISP did give me a refund of a month's subs over how long it was taking, even though it wasn't their fault.

JJ_Egan

Likewise to above post .
Its even possible that my long standing BT Sport multicast problems are internal .



Point is though BT OR callouts potentially lead to a customer charge . Where an hours internal testing by user should be the first point of call .

brianposter

If the fault is now fixed, "no fault found" simply indicates that the "engineer" does not know what he did to fix the fault. This is hardly an unusual situation, and the prior evidence suggests that the fault was an OR responsibility.
Simply tell your ISP that you will expect to recover any charges through their complaints procedure or in court if necessary, and that you are quite confident that the recordings will support your story.
In court your telephone bill is good enough evidence of the conversations, and it would normally be up to the ISP to refute your account.

DUTR

brianposter wrote: »

If the fault is now fixed, "no fault found" simply indicates that the "engineer" does not know what he did to fix the fault. This is hardly an unusual situation, and the prior evidence suggests that the fault was an OR responsibility.
Simply tell your ISP that you will expect to recover any charges through their complaints procedure or in court if necessary, and that you are quite confident that the recordings will support your story.
In court your telephone bill is good enough evidence of the conversations, and it would normally be up to the ISP to refute your account.

Logically it means exactly that, no fault was found or it was right when tested.

brianposter

DUTR wrote: »

Logically it means exactly that, no fault was found or it was right when tested.

Probably technically correct. The OP may have to insist that the contract term is unfair in the circumstances.

DUTR

brianposter wrote: »

Probably technically correct. The OP may have to insist that the contract term is unfair in the circumstances.

it can be annoying when a fault exists, I recall when I had a fault on my home line, line test suggested internal fault and the usual callout fee would apply, only after my stubbornness dawned I disconnected the extension and presto! no fault symptoms.

I'm not saying the OP doesn't have a fault, however the remote testing facilities is pretty much bang on.

Retrogamer

DUTR wrote: »

Logically it means exactly that, no fault was found or it was right when tested.

In the past I've worked with various ISP's for just over 10 years now can say in an ideal world the above is correct. But from experience it's not what happens normally.

We get a customer to connect to the test socket. Ask to remain there, remove any other electrical equipment from nearby the router and we test and monitor the connection. We can see high errors occuring, interference being detected and sometimes we can even see a hard fault such as a high resistance joint or similar.

We send out Openreach. Sometimes like has happened to the OP, Openreach give us the engineers report and says no fault found. WHen we check the connection despite it having being problematic for weeks / months suddenly it's all fine and there are no errors or interference or hard faults...despite the engineer reporting nothing was done.

The thing to remember is if Openreach don't find a fault, then the ISP has to pay them. If they do find a fault and it's before the test socket, then Openreach need to pay for it.

Now i'm not saying that Openreach are dishonest on reports on purpose to generate more revenue but i've had reports staying no fault found etc, then i've spoke with the customer and they've said engineers have changed the master socket / lead in cable / drop wire etc but it's not been mentioned on the report.