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

iniltous

Chances are ( in disputed cases of charges ) that it's not a case of 'now working but don't know why' , but 'was working fine when I arrived' ..if the test system detects faults obviously not located at the customers location , the fault isn't neccesarily 'appointed' as access into the property to fix the defect may not be needed, if an appointment isn't made, no charges can be raised.

Disputes are when the line tests OK , but the consumer says irrespective of what the 'tester' says , that the service isn't working, and insists an engineer attends, ( so an appointment made) and it's when the engineer turns up ( going directly to the property , not intervening in the network beforehand) the service is working fine.... OR then say , 'line is absolutley fine' customer says 'well it wasn't when I reported it faulty' ( even though the tester said it was), this is the crux of the problem...if there was a fault why isn't it present when the engineer attends, what some have suggested is that the fault is present and fixed but the engineer deliberately says it was right when tested ,so as to raise the unneccesary call out charge.

For context , .......if you were a plumber and someone asked you to come over quickly ( emergency call out sort of thing) because of a water leak, you get there and the person who called says 'It's OK, it stopped leaking by itself' ,most fair minded people I would suggest would say that it correct that the plumber still charges for the call out, after all they still had the expense of the call out , they may have had to refuse or delay other work, they are a business after all, although I accept this isn't a exact analogy , you have a choice of plumbers

AndyPK

if only open reach were as honest as plumbers :rotfl:

Retrogamer

brianposter wrote: »

So how do they report "now working but dont know why" ?

Often they will disconnect the copper pairs at various termination points to test them. When they reconnect the pairs back to the termination point, they are reterminating the connections. That can give a lot of problems if the pairs are corroded or dirty. So although they think they're only testing it, they're still often performing repairs to the network. There is a reterminating option within the questionnaire but they rarely use it.

iniltous wrote: »

Chances are ( in disputed cases of charges ) that it's not a case of 'now working but don't know why' , but 'was working fine when I arrived' ..if the test system detects faults obviously not located at the customers location , the fault isn't neccesarily 'appointed' as access into the property to fix the defect may not be needed, if an appointment isn't made, no charges can be raised.

Disputes are when the line tests OK , but the consumer says irrespective of what the 'tester' says , that the service isn't working, and insists an engineer attends, ( so an appointment made) and it's when the engineer turns up ( going directly to the property , not intervening in the network beforehand) the service is working fine.... OR then say , 'line is absolutley fine' customer says 'well it wasn't when I reported it faulty' ( even though the tester said it was), this is the crux of the problem...if there was a fault why isn't it present when the engineer attends, what some have suggested is that the fault is present and fixed but the engineer deliberately says it was right when tested ,so as to raise the unneccesary call out charge.

For context , .......if you were a plumber and someone asked you to come over quickly ( emergency call out sort of thing) because of a water leak, you get there and the person who called says 'It's OK, it stopped leaking by itself' ,most fair minded people I would suggest would say that it correct that the plumber still charges for the call out, after all they still had the expense of the call out , they may have had to refuse or delay other work, they are a business after all, although I accept this isn't a exact analogy , you have a choice of plumbers

Here's one example of what i used to get.

We got the customer into the test socket, with no other electrical equipment nearby. We then ask them to leave the router powered on.
Whilst in the test socket and monitoring it for 24 hours, we see thousands of errors being generated on the connection due to poor quality somewhere. This would be using an Openreach test on the Openreach website getting information from testing from the Openreach equipment. We log into our router and see it's barely doing any forward error correction. The Openreach owned RDSLAM port is doing most of it.

We would then get a customer to change filters and monitor again

Same results.

We can also see the line is dropping sync (again, from Openreach tests) frequently every day. We can log into the router and see the attainable sync rate is much lower than what it should be for a line of the length it is.

As the customer has tested from the test socket and swapped filters there is nothing more they can do.

So we have established it's very likely to be a fault somewhere outside the customer's home, or possible with the router or DSL cable at this stage. DSL cables and routers rarely become faulty like that.

Although the Openreach test can't find a fault significant enough to trigger it to fail, you can see with the errors, retrains and attainable speed issues that there is a problem of some sort. Customer reports issue has been happening for weeks.

We book and send out an Openreach engineer. Openreach engineer goes out. Calls customer to say testing from the street cabinet (PCP) but can't find any issues so will come to the home. Comes to the home, says can't find any issues there either and all ok. Charges ISP as no fault found and all testing ok.

We check again with testing the line, checking with customer and despite the fault occurring for weeks and despite the engineer apparently not doing anything, somehow the fault magically fixes itself the day after the engineer has been out "testing" the line.

So strange.