Previous house owner clobbered my broadband transfer

hojkoff

I am trying to transfer my broadband from my old house to my new house. However the previous vendor has clobbered by request which has delayed this until the 27th July. As I work from home (like most of us at the moment) I can't accept this.

I put the request to transfer in on the 14th June, and completed on the house on the 18th June. I was told that it would take 18 days to complete the transfer. On the 22nd June (today) I have been told by SSE that there is a pending case on the line and they cannot do anything until the 16th.

Is there anything I can do about this?

It would seem that the previous owner has put a request in to transfer her phone to her new property AFTER completion. My position on this is, I now own the house, it's my line so surely it follows I can kick her off it. However, Openreach may not see it this way. Is there anything I can do to remove her from the line?

Browntoa

Nope , it's a line in her name regardless of who owns the property. You cannot get openreach to cease a 3rd party line for yours.

hojkoff

If I put this another way, someone has a phone line to my house, and I want rid of it.

Is there no way to do that?

Surely by that logic, I can just indefinitely leave the phone line in my previous flat and block anyone from removing it.

JJ_Egan

Phone line belongs to Openreach , not you , not the previous owner .

Simplest is to use a mobile networking until its sorted .

brewerdave

How far in advance, did you know the date of completion ? If only a few days then I suspect that your vendor tried to arrange the switch of their line for the completion day so they would keep their phoneline to the last, but Openreach are well known for their inability to operate on such tight timescales.
 Even with plenty of notice the shortage of Openreach engineers means that you take pot luck.

hojkoff

Exchange was 7 days before completion.

I'm pretty sure she arranged the transfer to her new property after we had completed.

ThisnotThat

hojkoff said:

Exchange was 7 days before completion.

I'm pretty sure she arranged the transfer to her new property after we had completed.

Perhaps, but it's still a phone line in her name.

You could ask for a new phone line to be installed, probably at significant cost and certainly taking a significant amount of time to install, or you could just wait until the 16th and use mobile broadband as a stopgap.

PRAISETHESUN

hojkoff said:

If I put this another way, someone has a phone line to my house, and I want rid of it.

Is there no way to do that?

Surely by that logic, I can just indefinitely leave the phone line in my previous flat and block anyone from removing it.

I had a similar thing happen to me in a place I used to rent - the previous occupants left without telling any of their utility providers, so I had to jump through several hoops to get accounts set up in my name and ensure I wasn't billed for their usage. For the internet, OR has a process to take over a line in someone else's name but it does takes a few weeks.