Aaarrgh! Have I cut my 'phone line?

Manxman_in_exile

Yeah - I had partially cut through the wire.  It was a 5 - 10 minute fix with no inconvenience to us.  All OK now.

When the engineer turned up he had a puzzled look and told me the fault seemed to be right outside our property and I explained I thought I'd cut the wire*.  He told me I wasn't the first person to do so.

Quite impressed by BT/Openreach.  For some reason I couldn't report the fault online (it kept telling me I had not completed a required field but I couldn't work out what information was missing) but it was easy by 'phone and call handler was very helpful.  Quickly fixed within their indicated timeline (in fact a day early**).

*I had explained this when reporting the fault, but it hadn't filtered down to the engineer before he'd started testing the line.

** I always prefer the "promise long deliver short" approach to the other way round.

cajef

Could be an expensive mishap, as the damage was to their property you may be getting a bill they usually charge for damage to the external cables.

Manxman_in_exile

I know!                 

Retrogamer

The sad thing is, a lot of ISP's don't pass those charges onto the customer as disputes can be messy and they don't like the bad PR if people start to complain online so they just absorb the cost.
BT isn't one of those ISP's though.

If they do pass the charges onto you, please let us know how much they are. Depending on what was done to fix the line it should be less than £200.

iniltous

If BT are the provider , then regardless of what OR may charge BT,  £85 is added to the consumers BT bill , it’s a bit of a myth that many providers absorb the OR charge , but often the OR engineer doesn’t put the job clear as chargeable, so there is always a chance the charge isn’t raised because of this.
If  OR do raise a charge against the Telco, then why wouldn’t the Telco charge their customer after all they can ( and do ) state the charge is effectively an OR charge simply being passed on, even often the Telco charge is more than what the Telco is charged by Openreach for the visit ( fixing customer damage or something OR are not responsible for ).

EssexExile

Chargeable or not depends on how nice you were to the engineer and what sort of day he was having!

Retrogamer

iniltous said:

If BT are the provider , then regardless of what OR may charge BT,  £85 is added to the consumers BT bill , it’s a bit of a myth that many providers absorb the OR charge , but often the OR engineer doesn’t put the job clear as chargeable, so there is always a chance the charge isn’t raised because of this.
If  OR do raise a charge against the Telco, then why wouldn’t the Telco charge their customer after all they can ( and do ) state the charge is effectively an OR charge simply being passed on, even often the Telco charge is more than what the Telco is charged by Openreach for the visit ( fixing customer damage or something OR are not responsible for ).

It's not a bit of a myth and i know this because i've worked for a few UK broadband providers over the years. Some charge for sure, and personally i think that charging is better than absorbing for different reasons but i also understand from a business perspective why some don't pass charges on.

There are lots of reasons that make it difficult to enforce. Openreach frequently make mistakes on the job notes / tick sheet they fill in after jobs. So much so, that the vast majority of the ones i've looked at had at least one mistake / one part not filled in correctly.
To dispute and check all engineer notes, you need staff who are at least as experienced as the Openreach engineers in terms of how the network is set up. Usually only 3rd line / tertiary staff would be the ones doing this. But they are usually already hard pushed with doing dozens of other things and the staff numbers are generally not that high. I can only assume because their salary is so high it would eat a lot of the none very tight budget most need to operate on.

You have all that, then you need to couple with it that some customers and engineers will lie about what was done to create a dispute to try and get out of paying. You'll need more experienced staff to be a liason to handle these disputes which can take months to resolve. 

Sometimes the cost of having the staff and putting the time into enforcing the charges and handling the disputes, costs more than the ISP just absorbing them. Then you have the bad PR / reviews from people who get charged and annoyed.

molerat

Buying a bag of jelly crimps would likely have been a lot cheaper.