Openreach appointments

[CrunchyFrog]

Unfortunately our BBand has gone off again.  The OR Engineers who visited last Weds got the BBand working again and told told me they would have to take the service off line again 'at the weekend' and that it should only be off for an hour or so.  However, unannounced, the service went off again on Friday and is still of now.  They are hopeless !!!

So I'm back on the treadmill of speaking to yet another BT person, explaining the history, raising another fault and have booking for yet another OR engineer to come visit on Monday.

Customer service is abysmal and BT appear to little or no visibility of what OR are doing and when and have little control.

[tonysmini018]

Did the engineers say why they would have to take it offline again over the weekend?

[CrunchyFrog]

By way of background ........... As I understand it our original loss of service was due to 2 lines being brought down by a tractor.  OR 'spliced' the 2 fibres / cables back together but our service was on the cable that was re-spliced incorrectly; the other cable was re-spliced correctly and our neighbours service came back on the next day.   Our service was eventually reconnected nearly 3 weeks later as 4-5 different OR engineers couldn't work out what was wrong.  (As an aside, they didn't all appear to be trained to diagnose the problem and were not equipped to do so either.  One OR engineer 'gave up'  as it was 'outside his skill set').

The last 2 OR engineers who visited identified the problem and reconnected the service.  They said a permanent connection / re-splice would have to be made during an hour or so's outage at the weekend.

Anyway, as I noted before, the service went out on Friday and I'm awaiting an OR engineer to come out tomorrow or another cancelled appointment.

[tonysmini018]

Sounds like it had a temporary repair and the spans themselves need replacing.

[chrisjp]

You would think that, by now, Openreach would have sufficient technicians, with the appropriate training, to be able to splice optical fibre cables correctly wouldn't you? After all, fibre optics is hardly a new technology. As for one of OR's technicians saying reconnecting an optical fibre is "outside his skill set" - what exactly does his skill set cover? Making the tea?

[rbz5416]

@chrisjp 

Kirkby's hatchet job is across the whole BT Group, including Openreach. Despite the model failing pretty much everywhere it's been tried in the long-term, the cost cutting seems to be following the same failed mantra. Get rid of the highly skilled/better paid & replacing them with new recruits on the bottom rung &/or contractors.

[tonysmini018]

They work in specific groups depending on what responsibilities they have.

Some engineers are only copper trained, some fibre engineers only do CBT to customer, not everyone who works for Openreach is fully skilled to do everything.

You wouldn’t expect a CST engineer to rock up on a damage job and magically pull a new telegraph pole out of the back of his van.

[CrunchyFrog]

I'd say that out of the 5 different OR engineers who visited our house, only one (maybe two) of them was sufficiently au fait with the technology and had the kit to diagnose problem and solve it.