bt landline fault difficulty

littleboo

Often yes, but ducts collapse, get blocked, ducts get damaged by other contractors

iniltous

A cable in a duct is  no more protected than one direct in the ground if a JCB were digging the road up ( for example ) went through it , FWIW the vast majority of Openreach cables that carry multiple services are in ducts …if you consider BT’s reporting facilities poor ,  you are lucky that others also affected by the same fault  but not using  BT , will have used those other companies superior fault reporting processes , and will get the fault fixed for everyone, so  even without your intervention, your service would be repaired at the same time as theirs…..not every company is party to the automatic compensation scheme, but BT is , your compo generally will be based on the number of working days between the service outage and restoration, minus the first 2 days, but obviously the end user would need to have advised their provider that the had no service in the first place 
AFAIK , when reporting an issue , you chose a contact number for them to call you on, a mobile or alternative working landline etc, only an idiot would give the number they are reporting faulty as the contact number if it were completely out of service 
You state that not everyone affected by this fault uses BT , so how do BT have you over a barrel , the non BT customers cannot be over a BT barrel can they ?, if Openreach ( who presumably are fixing the problem ) are the only network provider , ( so no Virgin or Alt Network  ) then how is that BT or OR ‘fault’ than no other network is available to you….if another network is available to you then your ‘over a barrel’ comment doesn’t even apply to OR