Openreach fault handling

mjb2

I thought Openreach were setup to give a fair playing field across the ISPs and to stop BT giving its customers priority treatment. Its only when you have an issue that you find out this is not true and things are a lot more complicated than that.

Ofcom seem to have setup a horribly inefficient and time wasting system in order to encourage competition. This might encourage competition on price but they don't tell you that if you go to for example Vodafone (in my case) and there is an issue then you get second class support from Openreach compared to BT customers.

No one told me that Openreach have different teams of engineers for different ISPs and the Openreach-BT engineers and Openreach-Vodafone engineers can't see the information for each others customers. This means that they are cutting off each others customers to get their own customers working.

My neighbour, who is with BT, had the Openreach-BT engineer at her house two hours after reporting a fault. He got her line working by using my wires in the street. When I saw my broadband go down I went outside my house and saw the Openreach van. I told him that he had cut off my broadband and he blamed the Openreach-Vodafone engineers, he said that Vodafone customers use a subcontractor of Openreach and they are a bunch of cowboys and were always doing this sort of thing. He seemed like old-school BT blaming everything on other parts of his own company, only concerned with his current tasking and he is not concerned with other Openreach customers. I told him this was not acceptable but he drove off leaving my wires disconnected in the street.

There seems to be no way to complain to Openreach about this. I would have thought Vodafone would do something about this but they seem just as powerless to complain to Vodafone as everyone else. In my case Vodafone first line support (and even second line support which I eventually got through to) can get Openreach to reply so they want me to give them 3 days when I will be home so, when they eventually get through to Openreach they might possibly agree to one of them.

So the lesson from this is, if you want faults fixed in two hours get your broadband from BT, if you don't mind loosing your broadband go with Vodafone. Mine has been down for 7 days now with no sign of it being fixed. If you are a Vodafone and you get an issue like this, you need to spend full time on it, hours on the phone, staying in for missed appointments an so on. It really is a full time job.

I think Ofcom should force ISPs to disclose the level of awfulness of support from Openreach they have contracted.
So if you don't want to have the problems I have, get your broadband from BT.

littleboo

I know that this is what you were told, but I don't believe its correct as it would be very inefficient. As far as I know, Openreach engineers don't even know who the end provider is when they are allocated a fault. What is true, is that providers can buy different service levels from Openreach so it is the case that the speed of response can depend on your providers chosen SLA with OR.

Browntoa

They are not aware who the supplier is , only what the fault and line details are 

There are still areas where the existing records are very poor and supposedly spare equipment has been allocated already . That can result in another customer loosing service. There is a continuous ongoing project to update ( and tidy up the wiring in DP boxes) those records 

mjb2

Thanks for your replies

I am keen to get my facts straight because I am really annoyed about the Openreach engineer who disconnected my line. Since I can't speak to Openreach directly and Vodafone wont pursue it the only option I can think of is to make a complaint to Ofcom. This engineer who disconnected my line definitely said that if I had been a BT customer he could have contacted his manager to get the information to reconnect me but since I am a Vodafone customer he was not interested. I also got the strong impression from what he said (perhaps wrongly) that different engineers worked on Vodafone faults.

Are you saying that there is only 1 pool of Openreach engineers for all ISPs? It also appears to make a difference if the engineers are employed directly by Openreach like this one is or if they are employed by subcontractors like the engineers that arrive when Vodafone finally book an engineer for me.

Any information anyone can give me would help me phrase the complaint and judge how much truth this engineer was telling me.

Thanks, Martin

400ixl

OpenReach offer different levels of service for different prices. For example one which covers faster responses and weekend work and one which doesn't.

BT pays for the higher level of service. Vodafone as a bottom dweller of an ISP doesn't.

The jobs just go into a queue and get prioritised by contract. They do use subcontractors, but they are not as far as I am aware aligned to ISP's.

Many ISP's do have their own contracts with providers (not OpenReach themselves) who can do work inside the property (so from replacing the master socket onwards) and often use these as the first port of call if there is a home fault suspected. Likely this is what you mean.

Simply, if you chose a bargain basement supplier and get the relative experience as they will be taking the cheapest services they can get from their suppliers. Not much OpenReach or Ofcom will do about that.

iniltous

There is no such thing as Openreach engineers that work exclusively on one or a group of ISP’s , you appear to be accepting utter nonsense as fact ,  if what you state is true , why woukd the OR tech tell you about it ? , if anything nefarious was going on , don’t you think it’s going to be kept secret and not passed on to Joe Public? , the person was talking b*llocks .

The tech you spoke to couldn’t obtain information just for BT customers via a manager , faults are allocated by other engineers in a control setting not by managers ‘ the systems used to allocate work does not differentiate between ISP , if BT info were available then any and all ISP information would be available in the same fashion.

For every VF customer service that was disrupted by OR working on another ISP behalf will be BT customers service disrupted in exactly the same fashion, and Sky customers, and Talk  Talk customers , none affected any more than another .

Feel free to get onto Ofcom , they will simply tell you they don’t get involved in individual customers faults , if you say you it’s not the fault , but  that your experience is ‘evidence’ of Openreach favouring BT , they no doubt ask you what that’s based on , and you will say presumably it’s just your single fault , and the utter sh*te a Openreach tech or contractor told you , and ( trying to be kind to you ) they will may humour you and say have you any other evidence ( which you don’t ) and say they will keep it in mind .

FYI , you almost certainly don’t know this , but Openreach don’t offer one level of service to every ISP , they have several service level agreements ( SLA ) for ISP to chose from , the main difference is the target to repair period , the SLA  which BT take and  pay  extra for  is the better one , VF may or may not take a cheaper SLA , in which OR can take an extra day to repair , a 2 day target costs the ISP more than a 3 day target to repair.

…..so as an example if BT customer had a fault on Tuesday and a neighbour on a cheaper ISP also had a fault on Tuesday and they both reported the fault to their  respective ISPs at the same time  , and the BT customer was repaired on Thursday and the cheaper ISP repaired on Friday, no favouritism, OR hit the target on both faults , the cheap ISP is cheap in part by taking the cheaper  3 day repair SLA , compared to BT who pay more and take the 2 day SLA .
No doubt from your vantage point that looks like BT getting a better service, and it’s true ,but it’s not unfair , the ISP picked the SLA and they get the service commensurate with that SLA

 BT may charge their customers  a little bit more than the cheapest of the cheap, but they also pay OR a premium to to get a the better SLA , you may pick a provider to save a £ or two a month , that ISP may be able to offer the cheaper price by skimping on stuff you don’t see, like SLA’s 

mjb2

Thank you for your very full reply.
That is very interesting and also quite depressing that, at the level of the individual subscriber, there is so little accountability or transparency of Openreach and the ISPs.

I don't like letting them get away with such bad conduct of their engineer but, from what you say, it looks like there is not much I can do.

I don't know if MSE staff read these forums but, if they you, It would be really good if they could try to get more quantitative information about the SLAs each ISP has with Openreach so people will know the consequences of the cheap broadband deals on MSE  compare-broadband-deals
This does not say anything about support levels so people with not consider it.

Neil_Jones

mjb2 said:

I don't like letting them get away with such bad conduct of their engineer but, from what you say, it looks like there is not much I can do.

I don't know if MSE staff read these forums but, if they you, It would be really good if they could try to get more quantitative information about the SLAs each ISP has with Openreach so people will know the consequences of the cheap broadband deals on MSE  compare-broadband-deals
This does not say anything about support levels so people with not consider it.

Most customers simply do not care.

As long as it doesn't go down at the worst possible moment and when it does go down its fixed relatively quickly (and/or they get appropriate levels of compensation if applicable) then all that matters to 99% of the customers are "I'm paying £25.99 a month, end of discussion".

unforeseen

mjb2 said:

........ 
I don't know if MSE staff read these forums but, if they you, It would be really good if they could try to get more quantitative information about the SLAs each ISP has with Openreach so people will know the consequences of the cheap broadband deals on MSE  compare-broadband-deals
This does not say anything about support levels so people with not consider it.

I would think that that information would be commercial in confidence and would not be divulged

JSmithy45AD

littleboo said:

I know that this is what you were told, but I don't believe its correct as it would be very inefficient. As far as I know, Openreach engineers don't even know who the end provider is when they are allocated a fault. What is true, is that providers can buy different service levels from Openreach so it is the case that the speed of response can depend on your providers chosen SLA with OR.

Spot on. I do however doubt that BT domestic customers get 2 hour service, that sounds like it may be a business account for their neighbour.

onomatopoeia99

mjb2 said:

Thank you for your very full reply.
That is very interesting and also quite depressing that, at the level of the individual subscriber, there is so little accountability or transparency of Openreach and the ISPs.

I don't like letting them get away with such bad conduct of their engineer but, from what you say, it looks like there is not much I can do.

I don't know if MSE staff read these forums but, if they you, It would be really good if they could try to get more quantitative information about the SLAs each ISP has with Openreach so people will know the consequences of the cheap broadband deals on MSE  compare-broadband-deals
This does not say anything about support levels so people with not consider it.

If you work on the basis that the cheaper it is, the more money the provider will have shaved off what they spend on support and fault resolution, you won't got far wrong.

Or put more simply "you only get what you pay for".