Broadband Woes - contined
This is the press release that i sent out last week in the hope that it may attract some media attention. It has, a national TV network consumer affiars show has made contact although i don't want to announce who it is at this point in time whilst investigations in to the matter continue.
Andy Poulton, an IT Consultant in Wiltshire, lives in North Swindon and has long been frustrated by the slow speed of the broadband service that he is able to access – this is due to the fact that although he lives just 1.2km from the telephone exchange in Blunsdon, planning decisions mean that he is right on the limit of line length for service delivery, some 7.2km of cable lie between his house and the exchange.
On Monday September 17th Mr Poulton’s broadband connection failed.
Between September 17th and October 8th, BT claim to have fixed the fault no less than 8 times and yet Andy says the service is still unavailable.
Only once (right at the beginning of this saga) has a BT Openreach engineer visited Mr Poulton’s house (after carrying out work at the exchange) to verify that the service was still faulty. An administrative error somewhere in BT Openreach meant that the job was closed and so the engineer was unable to pursue the matter further and make good the repair.
Andy believes that it will require a visit to his house to properly address the issue and to prove that service has been restored to his satisfaction – a step that BT Openreach seem unwilling to take, even when they agree that a house visit is necessary.
This is despite BT Openreach calling Mr Poulton on the morning of Day 16, Wednesday October 3rd and explicitly stating that they would like to send an engineer to his house that afternoon to check the connection to the property.
Mr Poulton went to some length to re-arrange his diary, re-arranging several pre-existing appointments and made sure he was home by 1pm, the earliest that BT said an engineer would call.
BT Openreach did not visit the house, wasting one whole afternoon of Mr Poulton’s time. Instead, the Openreach engineer went to the Blunsdon telephone exchange and claims to have carried out a repair to some “jumpers”, signed the job off as completed and advised Mr Poulton’s Internet Service Provider that service had been restored.
Sadly, like the previous 4 BT Openreach interventions and the 3 subsequent interventions where BT Openreach claimed to have resolved the problem Mr Poulton’s broadband was still unserviceable.
Despite emails to CEOs of BT, BT Openreach, BT Wholesale and his Internet Service Provider, Mr Poulton has yet to be contacted by anyone in these organisations who may be able to resolve this issue to Mr Poulton’s satisfaction, once and for all.
In a recent interview Andy said “I cannot believe the level of apparent incompetence demonstrated by BT Openreach. I live less than 15 minutes from the exchange, all it would take is a simple visit to my house to confirm that they have failed to restore the service and yet no-one within Openreach seems prepared to take this action. They are either not prepared to offer an acceptable level of customer service and appear incompetent, economical with the truth or are deliberately acting in an anti-competitive manner to prevent my Internet Service Provider delivering an internet service to my home”
Notes
Andy Poulton has worked in IT for over 11 years, first in network design and implementation and customer support roles for many national companies and latterly as an IT adviser for Wiltshire based businesses, helping them identify and resolve their IT and web site issues and assisting them with their plans for growth and expansion
More information, including a complete diary from Andy’s perspective is available , just post a comment to this blog indicating that you like to know more.
BT Incompetence means Swindon based IT Consultant is 4 weeks without broadband
Andy Poulton, an IT Consultant in Wiltshire, lives in North Swindon and has long been frustrated by the slow speed of the broadband service that he is able to access – this is due to the fact that although he lives just 1.2km from the telephone exchange in Blunsdon, planning decisions mean that he is right on the limit of line length for service delivery, some 7.2km of cable lie between his house and the exchange.
On Monday September 17th Mr Poulton’s broadband connection failed.
Between September 17th and October 8th, BT claim to have fixed the fault no less than 8 times and yet Andy says the service is still unavailable.
Only once (right at the beginning of this saga) has a BT Openreach engineer visited Mr Poulton’s house (after carrying out work at the exchange) to verify that the service was still faulty. An administrative error somewhere in BT Openreach meant that the job was closed and so the engineer was unable to pursue the matter further and make good the repair.
Andy believes that it will require a visit to his house to properly address the issue and to prove that service has been restored to his satisfaction – a step that BT Openreach seem unwilling to take, even when they agree that a house visit is necessary.
This is despite BT Openreach calling Mr Poulton on the morning of Day 16, Wednesday October 3rd and explicitly stating that they would like to send an engineer to his house that afternoon to check the connection to the property.
Mr Poulton went to some length to re-arrange his diary, re-arranging several pre-existing appointments and made sure he was home by 1pm, the earliest that BT said an engineer would call.
BT Openreach did not visit the house, wasting one whole afternoon of Mr Poulton’s time. Instead, the Openreach engineer went to the Blunsdon telephone exchange and claims to have carried out a repair to some “jumpers”, signed the job off as completed and advised Mr Poulton’s Internet Service Provider that service had been restored.
Sadly, like the previous 4 BT Openreach interventions and the 3 subsequent interventions where BT Openreach claimed to have resolved the problem Mr Poulton’s broadband was still unserviceable.
Despite emails to CEOs of BT, BT Openreach, BT Wholesale and his Internet Service Provider, Mr Poulton has yet to be contacted by anyone in these organisations who may be able to resolve this issue to Mr Poulton’s satisfaction, once and for all.
In a recent interview Andy said “I cannot believe the level of apparent incompetence demonstrated by BT Openreach. I live less than 15 minutes from the exchange, all it would take is a simple visit to my house to confirm that they have failed to restore the service and yet no-one within Openreach seems prepared to take this action. They are either not prepared to offer an acceptable level of customer service and appear incompetent, economical with the truth or are deliberately acting in an anti-competitive manner to prevent my Internet Service Provider delivering an internet service to my home”
Notes
Andy Poulton has worked in IT for over 11 years, first in network design and implementation and customer support roles for many national companies and latterly as an IT adviser for Wiltshire based businesses, helping them identify and resolve their IT and web site issues and assisting them with their plans for growth and expansion
More information, including a complete diary from Andy’s perspective is available , just post a comment to this blog indicating that you like to know more.
posted by andy at
11:12 AM
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