BT engineers - missed appointments

Do tell us about your recent experiences with BT Openreach engineers and missed appointments. Have you waited in all day for someone to come and repair busted broadband kit and/or connections only to discover hours later that the engineer allocated to the job is a total no-show? Do you think a pattern is emerging with BT …

[Anonymous Coward]

Not one but two

Had our line connected yesterday by Kelly Communications, apparently a part of BT (or so the guy said) - couldn't be bothered arguing. They turned up on time with no bother at all and even managed to avoid the massive holes left by the builders how are redoing our road at the moment.

Unfortunately he wasn't able to actually do anything as our line was cut and he couldn't find the manhole as it was snowing so he went off muttering something about BT arranging another appointment.

A couple of hours later an openreach engineer knocked on the door saying "I know I've not got an appointment booked with you but I thought I'd nip in and chance you being in". He also connected something to the socket and then disappeared.

20 minutes later he came back saying that he'd fixed the issue but there was now a problem at the exchange. So he picked up all his equipment (weyhey!) and off he went saying he would see if he could get into the exchange but it didn't look likely.

I came back this morning and the phone and bb worked so whatever he did must have worked. Unfortunately he never told me his name so I can't thank him.

Perhaps it's cause I work for BT? However I doubt it as its in my g/fs name.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not one but two

BT engineers themselves are bloody good eggs. Not a problem with the men and women on the ground at all.

However they are managed by the biggest bunch of incompetents this side of anywhere.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Not one but two

"BT engineers themselves are bloody good eggs"

The older ones with actual BPO experience are.

Younger ones are usually cowboys whose sole intent is to get in and out as quickly as possible. I've had several show up, plug in a test set, listen for dialtone and leave, marking the line as fixed - when the complaint was foreign battery on the line - and an immediate retest showed it was still faulty.

One of the older guys explained it thus:

BT allocate about 40 minutes onsite per fault. Faults are paid per item closed, not on time taken, therefore it's not in their economic interest to deal with "difficult" issues. Ditto with installations.

The end result is that it took 6 years(!!!!!!) to get a faulty drop cable between the building and street replaced. That took care of 90% of the problems I'm seeing, however the engineers feely admit both the street distribution cable (to the local distribution cab) and the trunk cable (cab to exchange) are both rotten - I've looked at them when cabs and covers were opened and they're lead-sheathed, paper-insulated items with markings indicating they were installed inthe early 1960s (I quit the telco industry in the late 80s and have more than enough experience to identify cabling. Then I spent the 90s in the ISP game...)

BTOR older engineeers state the usual way of trying to "fix" customer complaints is to simply swap lines around for the "least-bad" pair (which is what was done with my building drop cable until all 11 pairs failed). That simply gives another person the rotten one.

BT have repeatedly claimed to Ofcom there is no paper-insulated or aluminium cable "in their network" - attempts to dispute these claims with Ofcom have met with hostile responses, even wehen complainants have evidence.

I've been informed from a reliable source that the definitiion of "in their network" stops at the distribution cabinets. Street cables don't count. Nonetheless it'd be interesting to call the bluff of anyone making this claim and asking them to make it a statutory declaration in front of a judge. The penalties for perjury might just cause them to rethink the claim.

It's not just BT who need to be dealt with firmly on the abject failures of Openreach. Ofcom have shown themselves ot be entirely too credulous on BT claims even when conflicting evidence is available. Refusing to reinvestigate is hard to escalate when Ofcom's staff seem to be disinterested in rocking the boat.

[Robin Bradshaw]

Re: Not one but two

I have a cunning plan, what we need is location data for these crusty old lead/paper/copper cables on googlemaps, the pikeys will have away with it in no time, since it cant be BT's cable as they have sworn they dont have any, they wont have to burn the pvc off it and they can sell the lead too. Win all round :)

[Alan Brown]

Re: Not one but two

Yeah, but properly maintained paper-insulated cable is a lot better for DSL performance than plastic insulated stuff.

The keywords being "properly maintained"

The other issue is that BT "cut to clear" when there are pair faults and that's a huge no-no on circuits carrying any numbers of DSL connections - unlike voice circuits, DSL is wideband RF and is badly affected by faults in adjacent circuits in the cable - which a voice circuit doesn't care about.

[Tim Jenkins]

Re: Not one but two

We had a very nice but extremely stressed OR engineer arrive for a mid-morning job in Machynlleth, mid-Wales. His next appointment (as dictated by the master 'puter at Openreach) was in Oswestry (50 miles east, 1.5 hours driving time if roads are clear, 3+ hours with roadworks, tractors, caravans, wind-turbine transporters and straying sheep), and the one after that was in Barmouth (60 miles west from Oswestry, 30 north from Machynlleth). Even before he left us, there was clearly no way the third job was going to be possible before that customers site closed, but there was apparently no way to change his pre-set schedule to visit them first, then head east and finally return to base after office hours. All OR's estimated travel-to-site times are apparently based on a 'national average', which round here is about as useful as a 4G handset down a slate mine...

[Tachikoma]

I have been dicked around by OpenReach twice while moving house, first they never turned up to disconnect my old property, but Sky closed my account and the internet still worked for another fortnight, so yay free broadband for the price of one days leave. However at the new property they made an appointment for 3 weeks time, about a week after I was to move in. On the second week, they sent me a text to say my appointment had been rescheduled for another 3 weeks. Booked the day off for the engineers visit and the night before the appointment they sent me another text to say it was all connected and there was no need to take the day off.

Not turning up at the old place to disconnect everything was an annoyance, but re-scheduling the connection to the new property by 3 weeks after already waiting 2 weeks was... not fun...

[Gonebirdin]

Very good service

Turned up on time to install fibre router, called me before hand to check I was home and let me know he was sorting out settings at the exchange and street cabinet.

Install was really neat and engineer very polite and well informed. All up and running in about an hour. Cannot fault him

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, not had a problem - engineer arrived on time (actually early, which he'd called me beforehand at work to ask if it was OK, giving me enough time to get home).

However, am currently trying to migrate a non-BT ADSL line onto an infinity business product and am scuppered by BT not being able to find the address. Now this is not entirely BT's fault, and the chap I'm dealing with has been very helpful and has patiently spent quite a while on the phone to me as we try plugging all sorts of things into their database, but does show that their computer systems clearly don't have a clue.

The issue is that the property is a pavilion on a sports ground, and that the billing address for the existing BT phone line is our main business location and not the address of the sports ground. But their computer cannot cope with this. If we book an engineer, he will turn up here, at the billing address, and not at the location in question. There is no option for 'send engineer to X'. Because the location doesn't appear to have any sort of valid address that matches what is on their computer, we can't go any further. It's rather surprising that BT can't look up oh, I don't know, the unique phone number currently installed and see what box it is connected to. You can actually see the BT exchange 100 yards away in a straight line.

It does make me wonder what would happen if we stopped paying the phone bill. Clearly they couldn't disconnect the line as they don't know where it is...

[Andy ORourke]

Disconnect ....,...

Done at the exchange end

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Disconnect ....,...

They know which port to disconnect, but the sub-loop can be confusing.

[Tim Jenkins]

I've had the frustrating experience of TWICE moving into new-build properties and have BT insist that the buildings postcode does not exist when I've tried to have a shiny BT-branded master socket enabled with a telephone circuit. Makes you wonder how their engineers managed to find the place in order to screw the sockets to the walls.

[Bonce]

Maybe they're measuring the wrong metrics?

I had a no-show for an appointment to install my BT Infinity in January this year. When I phoned to complain I was told that it was "a problem in their workflow system" which meant that although my appointment showed on BT systems and I'd received regular emails and texts counting down the days until my installation and urging me to make sure I was at home and ready for it, no appointment had been booked on the OpenReach system. So I then had to wait another 15 days for a new appointment.

Not off to a good start. Managed to get a measly £10 compensation for my wasted day, and had to fight hard for that.

[Volvic]

MBORC

Openreach had an MBORC status (Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control) on most of the country over the winter months which might go some way to explaining the rise in complaints.

MBORC basically means they can't actually confirm that they'll turn up on time or at all due to weather conditions. At one point in December we (major ISP) had over 10k overdue tickets with them because of it.

[Skoorb]

Re: MBORC

Yup. TalkTalk has the majority of lines on response level 2, so was getting around 90% of faults passed to Openreach 'fixed' in 48 hours. At the back end of last year this figure dropped to 65%.

All of this is due to 'MBORC' being declared. All faults marked 'MBORC', or in areas marked 'MBORC' are not included in the statistics, and all targets and agreements are immediately removed from these jobs.

The best past is Openreach keep marking faults as MBORC in apparently 'clear' areas without saying what is outside of their control on that fault. There is nothing the ISP can do but sit and wait.

So, the response from BT should be taken with a pinch of salt, as it will not include the massive proportion of MBORCed jobs stuffing everything up.

[Alan Brown]

Re: MBORC

At the start of February there were no MBORC areas.

I'm highly surprised that MBORC can be declared without giving a reason. That's an open invitation for abuse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: MBORC

Ah, MBORC....

Apparently snow in winter, high winds and rain in the UK count as "Matters beyond our reasonable control" rather than "Weather..."

[Anonymous Coward]

About a month ago, my phoneline went off.

Broadband still worked.

Registered a request.

No response.

Everntually got tired and tracked them down.

Their response was. "We haven't actioned this, because it might cost you money. So we waited until you rang us again, to ensure you really wanted it fixed."

The alternative was that I kept paying the direct debits, without having a phone.

I'm therefore of the opinion that they're lying.

[Alan Brown]

Re: About a month ago, my phoneline went off.

FWIWm, that's probably a DC fault. DSL operates at radio frequencies so it often continues to work (badly) when there's a minor break in the cable pair.

[Anonymous Coward]

No problems here..

I had an appointment for a fibre install on a Friday morning.... which turned out to be the Friday in the middle of the last major snow storm. I expected a cancellation but the engineer turned up.. actually two did, and within 30 minutes the upgrade was all done and they had gone on their way.

I

[colin79666]

No issue here

BT bod came round yesterday at the allotted time (phoned ahead as well when he was leaving his last job). Installed the new NTE5 socket and filter. Went to the cabinet to patch in the fibre links and came back 20 mins later to check the broadband was up and the phones were still functioning (including the extension). All in all about an hours work and done without issue.

[Josem]

I tried to switch to BT phone and fibre in December. My flat was ready for fibre had an appointment on the 14 Afternoon.

My Phone an adsl was disconnected in the morning from my previous ISP. The BT phone was connected from midday, The Openreach engineer showed at 3pm plugged something to my wall socket, went off for an hour no idea what for, came back unplugs the something and tells me He could not install the internet and another engineer have to come and do something outside in the box and I will be given another appointment.

They give me and Appointment for 14 January then changed to 18 January. I give them 7 days to finish the job.

The following week I spent several hours in the phone to cancel the contract and get the money paid in advance. They keep passing the buck from one operator to another no one wanted to cancel the contract finally they disconnected the phone on Xmas eve so I had no phone or internet for Xmas and New Year. in January the took the money from my direct debit I again spent several hours in the phone to get someone to cancel the direct debit and give me the refund of one year I paid for the phone in advance, finally someone called back and said that I will get my refund in 14 days I am still waiting. I want to take BT court for wasting my time and refund my money. Any advice?...

I called Virgin Media they give an appointment within two weeks and the cable was installed in time no hassle.

[Richard 12]

Small Claims, it's easy

It can also be done online, you usually don't need to go to court in person.

Costs £20 IIRC, added to the claim.

You will have to show that you've taken "reasonable" steps to settle the matter before going to court.

[Alan Brown]

3rd noshow

VDSL install: Failed to show up on Feb 21, March 7th and today (March 12th)

[stragen001]

engineers good, systems bad

My company probably books about 250 SFI visits per week with BT so I have a fair bit of experience with BT Wholesale.

The biggest problem we find is that BTs diagnostics will return "no fault in the BT network" for pretty much every fault, and BT's ONLY response to every fault is to send an SFI......even if the diags(our own and bts) clearly show its a network problem or not something an SFI can fix. This means there are way more sfi visits booked than there should be. Of course, the fact that bt charge you £120+vat if they can find any excuse to blame local equipment has nothing whatsoever to do with their insistence on an sfi visit for every fault......

And don't even get me started on their callcentre! I once had a conversation with them and asked to speak to "someone that actually knows how ADSL works and I can have a technical discussion with" and was told that "we do not have anyone like that"

[Skoorb]

Re: engineers good, systems bad

See http://aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband-sfi.html and http://aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband-sfi-isp.html for the view from an ISP on the 'old' SFI product.

This has now been improved somewhat with SFI2 (http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/products/serviceproducts/sfi2/sfi2.do), but still ain't great.

[Alan Brown]

Re: engineers good, systems bad

> I once had a conversation with them and asked to speak to "someone that actually knows how ADSL works and I can have a technical discussion with" and was told that "we do not have anyone like that"

You should fire that through to ofcom. :)

[Chloe Cresswell]

Had a new line install booked with BT, 1300-1800 slot. Engineer arrived at new building at 0900, phoned us to find out why no one was there.

When pointed out there would be someone there in the time slot he was booked in for "I don't know if I can return then".

Home line for employee with fttc install.

fttc engineer arrives at 0930, tries to force the install onto employee's room mate's line (which had voice + adsl).

Leaves, marked that customer refused entry.

1230 2nd engineer arrives to fit the physical line for the new service..

[Tim036]

No-Show and fed rubbish !

Living in a rural part of the UK, all the copper is up on poles. At the end of last November, the line went very noisy and Broadband dropped out, 10 days later very skilled Engineer came out and fixed.

Ditto december, ditto January but this time it was a no-show.

Winging a lot, I was told that it was a 'new' ticket (my jargon) and another 10 days would pass. Explaining that they hadn't done any thing with the first 'ticket' and may I speak to the suppervisor's supervisor , they fixed it in 3 working days. (Excuse was Engineer had tested it in the exchange and line was OK ! = rubbish)

Meanwhile the telco '3' has a new mast with G3 on it nearby ! It's speed if on occasion up to 6MB/s. and the copper offer 1MB/s tops often less, I bought a WiFi dongle andget the familly's tablets, laptops etc running on it.

As soon as I've got my Linux (Ubuntu 12.04) Desktop PC running on it I'm ditching the landline as an expensive joke.

(This OS is a bit picky as to WiFi Dongle and a compatible one should be with me this week)

Tim

[scoopy]

Lead times

Just had a new BT master socket installed. Engineer turned up on appointed day (interestingly a contractor) and job completed to good standard. Only issue was I had to wait 6 weeks for the install, which feels like at least 4 too many.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Lead times

Our last business appointment was a six week lead time for a non-fault Engineer appointment. No-one turned up and no-one contacted us to tell us this in advance...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who'd want to be a BT Engineer

All the existing, qualified ones cost to much to keep, according to the Mgt. The solution is to 'manage' them out of their jobs by steadily increasing their targets. The aim is to replace them with less qualified people on 'cheaper' contracts or to force existing employees to accept changes to their contract.

Don't take my word for it. Just ask your local friendly BT engineer, the next time they visit, or not.

[JaimieV]

Re: Who'd want to be a BT Engineer

All too true. I wonder if the downvoter is a BT manager?

[Alan Brown]

Re: Who'd want to be a BT Engineer

"The aim is to replace them with less qualified people on 'cheaper' contracts"

Hence why BT is taking on hundreds of ex-squaddies as contractors. It's not about giving them jobs, although that makes a nice soundbite. They'll be out on their collective ear as soon as their purpose is served.(*)

(*) It's trivial to get rid of contractors, which is why they're setup like that instead of as employees.

[Robin Bradshaw]

Oh BT let me count the ways i hate you

When I first moved into my house I arranged to get the phone line/adsl reconnected waited in for the engineer and all i got was a txt message saying it was all done, now im sure they had done something but they hadnt connected the phone as it was still completely dead.

Ringing them up and getting past the standard doom and gloom it will cost you £££ if its your fault i tried to explain that it was probably connected as far as the pole at the end of the street but that I needed it to be connected all the way to my house, some more waffeling about availability of engineers and I finally cracked and told the nice lady if you dont fix it im going to climb up the pole and hook up the pair myself.

The engineer and his nice fluke line break tester thingy arrived first thing next morning and sorted it out :)

Then last year I had a friend banging on my door asking "if i ever answered the phone?" to which i replied no but it hasnt been ringing anyway, which is how i found the AC ringing signal was broken and why I hadnt had any nuisance calls for a few months.

Reported the fault, the engineer turned up at the allotted time tested the line and confirmed it was broken but it was a job for the people in the exchange not him and said they would fix it and buggered off.

That evening I got a text message to tell me it was fixed so I tested the line and it wasnt. So I got to play some fault report ping pong with them, reopen the fault, their helpfull website shown me a nice picture saying its my equipment at fault and closing the issue, me reopening the fault etc etc

The fifth time I reopened the fault I had lost my temper and added the comment "for god sake check the line card at the exchange" to the ticket. That seemed to do the trick.

Oh BT I hate you so.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sat around from 8am 'til 1pm waiting for engineers that never showed up to install a business line. They are claiming that the job was cancelled on Friday evening and that we had been contacted. Except we hadn't. I thought BT's core business was communication, evidently not. It's bullshitting when the cock up, clearly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Edit: This was a Saturday morning too. Not amused. I'll be invoicing my time at the Saturday rate.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It would also be very useful to know where I was on the day’s list of visits. A location tracker even."

Gone too far. Sorry, but no! agreed that missing agreed dates is not good enough, but this suggestion is too far, intrusive even. You'd get no cooperation from me!

[JaimieV]

The vans *have* location trackers

They don't use them for anything useful like seeing how accurate the system's automatic travel time calculation is, or even to make sure that engineers aren't having a sneaky snooze in a layby. They use them to make sure that the vans are parked where they should be out of hours.

[Tim 85]

No show and they still try and charge me

I booked an engineer to come and shift my Master Socket last week. It was an afternoon appointment but the engineer failed to show so when it got to 6:00pm I rang BT to find out where the guy was. I then spent 40 minutes being transferred and put on hold before I get to someone who says the job has been done and there is nothing he can do - even manages to hang up on me mid-sentence. A few days later I receive an e-mail saying that my supplementary bill is available online and sure enough, an additional £130 has been added to my next bill

I have complained to BT a couple of different times and have got a response back from one of their forum moderators where I also posted about this. The guy was as helpful as he could be and he said the charge would be removed from my bill - 4 days later it is still there.

It is a really crap situation as I don't have the time to keep on chasing this with BT and if I cancel my direct debit and refuse to pay I will end up wasting my time having to go through the whole thing again and probably getting blacked marked for something that I shouldn't even have to pay. Still, there is no way in the world I am losing £130 to these clowns. As soon as this is sorted then I am ditching BT

[Naadir Jeewa]

I dare anyone in a major urban area to beat 126 days and counting to get a line plant conducted in London.

Moved into a new build in an existing housing estate which already has BT FTTC and Virgin Media. Virgin Media's forbidden for at least 12 months by the housing association, so we're stuck with OpenReach. I spent two weeks trying to get Sky to place an order, but unfortunately they don't understand the process, even when I send them the OpenReach manual explaining how to do it.

Next, I place an order with BT Retail and they book an engineer in for one month's time. I wait, and they don't show up for a morning appointment. BT call centre tells me the engineer is running late, and to stay in for the afternoon. Still no show, phone BT again and they say "there are no notes in the system....ooh one just came in...engineer said there's no cable so couldn't do install." I ask why the previous call centre staff operator lied, which led to denials from BT, with promises of an engineer in a few days and compensation. All lies, obviously.

Nothing happens for a few days. I phone back, and they book another appointment in a months time. Engineer does show up, spends two hours, then concludes there are no cables and leaves.

I phone BT and ask why OpenReach didn't do a line plant, to which there's no proper answer. Am left hanging ever since. Repeated tweets at them were the only way to get status updates, which were usually of the sort "work to be done - update next week".

I start contacting the housing association via my local councillor - they tell me OpenReach were supposed to do a line plant as soon as residents started placing orders - instead OpenReach just happily booked engineers to go visit households where they hadn't laid copper for months. Housing Association and I both start trying to contact OpenReach to no avail for several months. I write a letter to Sir Michael Rake and get unhelpful calls from "Executive Level Complaints", or "Executive Pass the Buck" as it should be known.

Finally, the local councillor tries to contact them on a political level, at which point OpenReach start blaming the council because they couldn't get a permit because of existing gas works. Though, it should be noted that the gas works started to take place several months after OpenReach were supposed to be completing works.

In the meantime, OpenReach continue to book engineer appointments for lines which can't be connected, who then never show up. I've stopped waiting in for them as well.

[Naadir Jeewa]

I should also add that there's no way of complaining about OpenReach. As they're not customer facing, they're not a member of any ajudication service, and OFCOM don't resolve complaints on behalf of end user customer, which means BTOR can continue to act (or not) with impunity.

[Alan Brown]

Ofcom will take complaints about OR if you phone up. They did for me.

Don't expect them to actually do anything, but if enough people complain perhaps that might change.

[Naadir Jeewa]

OFCOM take complaints, but they're only for "monitoring". They wont actually do anything.

[Naadir Jeewa]

So, I phoned OFCOM. There's no SLA for OpenReach to provision a PSTN line, just an industry guidance of "10 days." Then the adviser hung up on me when I tried to explain the issue.

Amazing.

Who regulates the regulator?

[CTaylor]

BT engineers breaking my belongings!

I know this forum is mainly about missed appointments.... However I thought I would share my horror story with you all.

So this Monday (11th March), 3 engineers turn up in two vans to install our new phone line. The young men seemed nice and I offered them all a drink upon arrival. I then left them to get on with their job and asked them to phone me if there were any problems. Alternatively I said they could find me in the workshop, which is about 100 yards from the house.

I came back in to the house a couple of hours later to check everything was ok and to offer more cups of tea, and the engineer inside the house said everything was fine. He was installing the new socket on the wall next to the TV and I had noticed that he had moved our surround system to the front of the TV cabinet so he had more room to work. The new location for the socket seemed a somewhat difficult one, as it was right in the corner of the room and I had already moved the furniture out of the way where the old socket is in order for the new one to be placed there.

Anyway... I asked the engineer to give me a call when everything was done so I could come and lock the house. He did so (after 6 hours of being on my property) and said everything was finished and fine and said he would leave me our new telephone number. I thanked him for everything and that was that.

Me and my partner arrive home just before 8pm to find an absolute disgrace in our house. I don't really know were to start:

*First thing we noticed was that both ours and our neighbours garden gates had been left open, resulting in my rabbits being tormented by the dog from next door all afternoon.

*Inside the house, the old socket had been dismantled and wires left sticking out. I discovered the hard way that one wire was still live when putting it back together!

*Our speakers were still round the front of the TV cabinet, which wasn't really an issue until we got a closer look. Brick dust was all over one side of the TV (the opposite side to the socket) so we had a look and found that the engineer had pulled the sound system out of the way that hard that the cable attaching it to the TV had been snapped!! Now not only were our speakers broken, but the metal part which was once connected to the speaker wires was still inside our TV! So no sound on our TV any more.

£600 worth of damage later and it's safe to say I was angry. I wouldn't have been half as mad if the engineer had told me before he left!

Complaint was made Monday evening and was told I would be contacted within 24 hours. Still waiting.......

[Phil W]

Re: BT engineers breaking my belongings!

Sounds like they did a shocking job, but I'm curious as to how you come up with £600 of damage?

From the way you described it you've got some brick dust to clean up, and snapped a cable (hdmi/toslink or something?)

Not excusing their poor workmanship and shocking behaviour and maybe it's just how you've worded it, but it sounds to me like they just did a crappy and messy job, and caused some minor damage rather than £600 worth.

[Corinne]

Re: BT engineers breaking my belongings! @Phil

I think it was the bit where he says "but the metal part which was once connected to the speaker wires was still inside our TV". If his TV works the same as mine, if the external speaker system is plugged in then that automatically over-rides the TV's inbuilt speakers. So CTaylor's TV will be thinking the surround sound system is plugged in and won't use it's own speakers, while he can't plug anything in because of the broken bits left inside the TV.

So either an expensive repair job on the TV or a replacement TV.

[Phil W]

Re: BT engineers breaking my belongings! @Phil

Ah, I'm seeing it better now!

[Naadir Jeewa]

This is OFCOM's stupid written response:

"In terms of our role, our regulations stating that one should be in place relate to Service Providers that supply and charge end users (customers) for the service rather than Openreach.

Whilst I am unsure as to the nature of your complaint, I should explain that a consumer’s contract is with their provider and as such, they have no relationship with Openreach. In the event that a there is a problem with their phone or broadband service, or an issue about the work that has been done at their premises by an engineer, they should raise this with their service provider.

The provider has a duty of care to have a duty of care to manage their customer’s complaint, ensure that Openreach are doing what they can to sort out the problem and update their customers as things progress. Their service provider can liaise with Openreach as necessary.

If a consumer remains unhappy with the way their provider is handling the issue, they may wish to follow their provider’s complaints process. Details of this should be shown on their provider’s website, or can be obtained from their customer services department directly."

So, OFCOM don't understand basic principal-agent theory. Given that BTOR is the monopoly copper provider, what means of compellence does a end-user customer have if they have to go through an intermediary to whom BTOR withholds information?