Why is Full Fibre Broadband Installation taking more than two months?

[NGRobinson]

My daughter order full fibre broadband on the 2nd April and  does not have a connection despite having a coil of fibre cable just outside her house. Here is the sorry history

• The order for full fire was placed with BT on 2nd April
• She was given a provisional date for the installation of about two weeks later
• On 10th April, she has informed that the installation would be delayed due to  a blockage in the pavement based ducts
• She also informed by text that a installation would be completed between 8am and 1pm on 6th July !!!!
• In the mean time with a week or so three vans with accompanying Openreach engineers appeared one morning and dug up the pavement outside my daughters house  and cleared the blockage
• Plus they ran a fibre cable from a connection point within a pavement based  Openreach duct to just outside the house and left the fibre end coiled up against the outside wall.
• All that needs to be done seemingly is install the white box fibre modem inside the house, make the fibre connection and enable the service. Probably 30 minutes work at most
• Since then absolutely no progress what so ever despite calling BT every two to three days, making complaints and trying to escalate.
• Note that BT promise to make a call back with 48 hours but never do. I always my daughter calling BT
• What makes things even more frustrating is that  I ordered full fibre broadband on the 15th April and it is was installed as scheduled on the 30th April. I only live literally a stone throw away from my daughter.
• BT seem incapable of getting this resolved with Openreach nor can they provide a reason for the delay

[iniltous]

Problems can and do occur , once the problem is identified the installation date is moved out significantly to avoid any possible compensation claims , usually when the issue is resolved ( and the issue seems to be resolved in this case if there is now a cable coiled at the house wall ) and all that is needed is the final part of the installation, the normal process is Openreach close their task ( 1st stage of a 2 stage installation ), this prompts the ISP (BT in this case) to get in touch with the customer again and hopefully arrange a new date for the second stage,  bringing the date forward from the ‘holding date’ assigned previously.

In this case presumably either Openreach have not closed their task and therefore BT are unaware the Openreach 1st stage is done ( and even if you call the system will still show Openreach stage 1 incomplete) or OR have closed the stage 1 activity but BT have yet to respond and contact the customer to arrange a new appointment date .

As it’s only BT that you only can deal with directly ( not Openreach ) all you can do is persevere and hope the BT representative understands that the job can now proceed and it simply needs a convenient appointment for the customer.

Not much help to you really , this is only a customer to customer forum, not a way to interact with BT in any meaningful way , however the forum is moderated by BT staff who may offer to take a look on your behalf.

[NGRobinson]

Thank you for your reply. It has given me some insight into Openreach's processes and may help in getting things moved on.

Ill keep this post open in the hope that a BT moderator can give some further advice.

I must admit I am totally frustrated with BT and Openreach and I am considering going to another broadband supplier like Sky. Even though that will still need Openreach to do their thing, it might just get things moved on quicker.

[NGRobinson · Accepted solution]

I just want to give an update on how this problem was resolved 

After more than two months we ended up at a point with BT and Openreach, after many phones calls and escalations, whereby Openreach had confirmed ( I presume by talking to the civils team that actually did the work) that the duct blockage had been cleared and that a fibre cable had been run to our property. Openreach escalations team were telling BT to arrange a date for an engineer to do the final connection and installation of full fibre. However, BT were unable to schedule an engineer as their software was still seeing that civils work was not confirmed as completed.  

In the end, we took matters into our own hands and we cancelled the full fibre order. The next day we reordered full fibre. We were given an installation date for nine days later.  An Openreach installation engineer turned up as scheduled and completed the installation within an hour. Our full fibre is now working at 1gbps. Job finally done after 10 weeks!!!!

One last comment, it should not be for the customer to resolve issues between Openreach and BT. There fundamentally seems to be no way that BT staff at the call centre or within Openreach can manually override things and just get an installation engineer sent out to do an installation job