Want your broadband fixed? Best write to your MP, UK's Zen Internet tells customer Anyone familiar with contacting a tech support helpdesk has heard the groan-inducing line: "Have you turned it on and off again?" For that reason, we can't help but doff our cap to indie ISP Zen Internet, which instructed one customer beset by connectivity drops to contact his MP. The suggestion was made to one El Reg reader …
either, or, both. No matter, it appears to make the impossible ("MP issue", aka magnetic pulse / minion probe) into possible :(
p.s. did you say he was with TalkTalk? VM? BT? It's so reassuring to see that Zen Internet has FINALLY joined the rest of the merry customer disservice crew :)
Zen have been rubbish for a while now. I had a couple of issues with them a year or so ago (just before lockdown) and while they always answered the phone quickly, I was never able to get any sense out of them. Lots of "oh, the person who was dealing with you is out of the office" and having to explain the issue over and over, it was as if they had no ticket system for dealing with ongoing issues.
They've now joined the legion of companies still using Covid-19 as an excuse to provide slow responses and not answer the phone. This sort of excuse always looks a little thin when the company is literally in the comms business. They are going to find themselves having retention issues if they charge AAISP money for TalkTalk service.
> did you say he was with TalkTalk? VM? BT?
Yes, yes and yes in the past. I switched to Zen in an effort to get the lines fixed and gave them a heads-up that the cables were rotten before even activating service, with reassurances givem (in writing) that they would ensure it was dealt with properly before I signed on the dotted lines
Had similar happen the other month at my parents' house - their line was aged and mostly knackered, Openreach wombles were clambering up the telegraph pole to fix someone else's line, broke theirs when the pole swayed a bit. To their credit, they did at least re-string a line there and then rather than wait for one of us to go through the pain of ringing TT to get Openreach back out (been there before*), and the physical connection at the house is much tidier now.
* - best one was years ago. Openreach needed to work on base of telegraph pole. Gets crew to come dig the pavement up. Digging crew cuts through cable at base of pole taking out everyone's phone and broadband. They phone Openreach who postpone job a day to change scope. Digging crew then fills the hole in (!). Openreach eventually come out - the hole is filled in, can't do anything. Have to wait several days for new digging crew to come out, dig up filled in pavement. These days it would have been no problem, just use mobile data on phones. Back then it was a complete PITA.
A lot of rural/semi-rural angland is still on this stuff
You know it's bad when you see water draining out of a busted cable - these things are supposed to be positively pressurised to keep water out even if there IS a break in the sheath, but BTOR insiders tell me that that proactive monitoring/maintenance of this stuff went out the window decades ago so it only gets attention if someone reports zero air pressure on the gauges - unfortunately if water gets in it can cause a false positive reading if the watertable rises around the breach point and repressuriuses the remaining air
BT have been using rotting infrastructure for decades and outside of urban centres there's been zero competition to force them to actually improve their attitude
While I'm not in comms, I do work with lead sheathed & oil impregnated hardware. Most of which installed well over 40 years ago. Initial lifetime estimates were of order 40 years when built; but have been extended repeatedly as knowledge of how to look after them and deterioration has accumulated.
The papers themselves are very survivable (read, century plus) provided you keep the water out, and the pressure system topped up & maintained. The downside obviously is if if (when) they are broken by outside factors - landslides, or idiots in JCB's not using cable testers before digging - the oil will leak.
From what I've seen described here the positive pressure systems in openreach's remit are being left to rot completely, presumably on cost grounds. Does this also mean these are spewing oil all over the place. (Or just plain not topping it up?)
If it is the latter, the paper can't possibly survive more than 5-10 years before water gets in and ruins the insulation. Probably less.
I can only assume fixing the faults repeatedly is cheaper for them than maintenance procedures; which emphatically is not the case for the cables I look after. I'm not really sure how they get away with this because the cost of streetworks (and even the permission to close roads to do them) is often more expensive than the actual patch job to fix broken sheath.
I have no doubt if open reach are spewing oil into the ground, some of that oil is also going into Aquifers, which is definitely not good.
These comms cables are air-filled paper-wrapped copper, not paper and oil (BT mainly leapfrogged to PVC insulated+greasefilled outdoor cables and had a disasterous flirtation with aluminium condustors for a while)
Which means once water gets in, several metres of cable each side of the breach (at minimum) is wrecked
Without a regulator that has teeth or competition leeping them honest, BT has been shortchanging communities for years - Various watchers have described seeing water "pouring" out of the ends of these old cables when they've been chopped and the copper stolen.
At some point you have to wonder if certain "caravan dwelling roaming individuals" have been doing the UK a favour with their various countryside antics by forcing cabling upgrades to happen regardless of BT's refusal to schedule them
The Openreach "official line" is that there are no lead sheathed cables in service anymore - which is privabley untrue. They have the same official line about aluminium cables, Also provably untrue in many areas.
(It wouls also mean that "caravan dwelling individuals" in possession of lead sheathed copper cables can't possibly be charged with cable theft because they would require them to be theiving cables which legally don't exist....)
The problem is that if BTOR are this fundamentally dishonest about their declarations can anything else they say be trusted?
Those caravan dwelling individuals have on occasion tried to steal our equipment too... With rather less pleasant consequences. Grim - but there have been occasions where we've seen a hacksaw lodged into the insulation, evidence of flashover and very obvious consequences for the miscreant - at the very least severe burns, probably a lot worse. It's not as though they are going to surface from the woodwork to reveal how they got that injury.
On the subject of BTOR dishonesty - I would hazard a guess their record system originates in days of paper drawings. Modernising an asset register of that scale is a thankless, underfunded and losing battle. I can say this because I've seen essentially the same problem in other utilities with record keeping. Some rather high profile fines and companies dismantled because of them in fact.
Regulators chasing targets like "cost to consumer" don't address the underlying problems that can and will faults. I'm not looking for a license to print money to fix faults, but it would be nice to know that networks of all types were adequately funded to maintain what they have to "current" standards. As opposed to diminishing knowledge and condition over time.
Ofwat, Ofcom, Ofgem all in the firing line for my anger here. Economic damage, if not life damage is being done because of the lack of a push and funding to get these things in order.
"... some of that oil is also going into Aquifers, which is definitely not good."
If by "not good", you are implying that the oil may seep into drinking waters would this not be detected fairly rapidly and at non-toxic concentrations by the Quality Control guys at the water companies and rectified with the alacrity UKland always applies to public health issues?
Pressurised cables are only used on the ‘e’ side network - the large cables back to the exchange. VDSL is delivered over the ‘D’ side network which isn’t pressurised and isn’t lead. You can completely disconnect these wires and your broadband will still work.
An ancient lead ‘E’ side cable would not be terminated in a VDSL cabinet. Those cables are terminated in passive cabinets which are then linked to the cabinet with the active electronics in. Pressure alarms are proactively monitored and responded to urgently because water ingress into an ‘e’ side cable causes thousands of telephone line faults.
Someone has been telling you porkies, or you’ve misunderstood what people have been telling you.
I've had Openreach out 6 times since December to fix a similar sounding issue. Each time the engineer claims to have fixed something stupid done by the last guy. Currently it's stable but I'm waiting for the speed to start dropping again and then the frequent disconnects. Openreach are poor.
Very familiar. Our internal wiring (constrained by building layout and point of entry) requires use of local drop filters by desks. After we upgraded to VDSL with poor performance, an "engineer" replaced the screw down master socket with a new nasty clip on NTE5C but disconnected its phone socket as it would "degrade VDSL performance". This didn't make any difference to VDSL but denied us a necessary phone at the point of entry.
The next "engineer" stated that the master should be moved to the office side of the building, removed the NTE5C and reconnected via our internal wiring to a VDSL filter master in the office. He then routed the second pair back to a phone outlet where the original master had been (at the incomer). This made no difference to the VDSL performance but prevents us maintaining or modifying our internal wiring as it's all now provider side and we can't legally touch it.
We're still waiting for yet another "engineer" to revert the wiring to common sense and we still get around 35% of our contracted speed at best as before.
According to Openretch it's always the customer's wiring at fault despite the 17MHz bandwidth signal having typically travelled around 1km over largely impedance uncontrolled unscreened wiring with numerous joints before it reaches the premises.
Our analysis shows full carrier speed but masses of corrupt and retried packets. We've reported this several times but every "engineer" who turns up starts their tests from scratch, ignoring all evidence previously gathered. The last one even told me to stop informing him as "he had to make his own mind up"". Analysis from a chartered engineer working on digital systems up to around 100MHz was apparently no use to him for this purpose.
"Engineer" as in "I'll put the engine 'ere".
"Engineer" as in "I'll put the engine 'ere".
More like as in "barely trained simian, ex armed forces"
6 weeks instruction in "booting does NOT mean kicking it to death" and how to push buttons on instruments to get readings they can't actually explain (they get offended if you ask them to, it's amusing) does not make one an "engineer"
It's the same attiude/obfuscation which has made the broom pushers around the office "sanitary engineers"
Befire I went FTTP I had Open Reach out 6 times to fix my copper pair. Each time it was in fact a different fault. (Bad or corroded connections in water filled conduit and a couple in the overhead link)
Fortunately my ISP (IDNET) simply would not give up until all the issues were fixed, It then performed brilliantly until replaced with fibre.
Which has its own quirks. Cant explain why, but often trying to contact a web site there is a distinct pause beoire data starts flowing
Sorry Zen. Your customer, your problem. End Of. Don't pass the buck in this shitty manner.
If I was the customer I would take this and raise an official complaint. No joy, small claims court.
Orange Internet (as it was back then) tried a similar stunt, only the court paper work got them to fix the issue and also compensate for the losses..and got me out of the contract.
> Orange Internet (as it was back then) tried a similar stunt, only the court paper work got them to fix the issue and also compensate for the losses..and got me out of the contract.
As a general rule I'd say I'm calm however I am particularly annoyed with TPE, whose repeated attempts to compensate me by as small an amount as they can get away with led to multiple appeals to their customer services and two to the regulator for each of the rather more significant government-mandated poor service payouts, where they tried it on again. For the first, a threat of regulator involvement got "go on then" for a response, which I forwarded with some glee; for the second I took the opportunity to mention not getting the full amount previously, and ended up netting the difference in addition plus a (little) bit for wasted time.
I'm also annoyed with CrossCountry, who failed to respond to a fault report related to a Christmas ticket booking I was unable to complete online. Despite promising to look into it when prompted, they then did nothing for a month before noting "it's too late now". The ombudsman said I've a case there too, but unless there's compensation available for wasted time (which I didn't find clear) I'm not sure what I get out of pursuing it... :(
"This is an ancient ECI cabinet and the lines here have been problematic forever (lead sheathed paper insulated ... "
If this is true, then Openreach is guilty of not having upgraded that thing in due course. Openreach just let it rot to avoid the costs of ensuring proper service.
I'm guessing that a new cabinet costs a pretty penny, for sure, but unless I'm mistaken, Openreach is making a lot of pretty pennies. Time to drop one and make your service better.
Oh, and you might want to take stock of the age of all your cabinets and start planning their replacement dates.
As much as that "seems" to make sense, I suspect the failure rate is relatively low, and given there is a fibre rollout in progress it would probably involve replacing 10's of thousands of cabinets which are in reasonable condition and would remain so until the switchover.
Plus I suspect replacing a cab would be a substantial outage which would likely to result in residents with pitchforks in the current homeworking scenario.
The right thing to do here is be more ready to replace them once they start having issues...
" given there is a fibre rollout in progress "
Not where ECI cabinets are present. There are 40% of BTOR's fleet and they can't do GPON or 300MB/s service
Leatherhead is a classic example. The fibre service STOPS where newer Huawei cabinets do and there are "no forseeable plans" to provide FTTH in areas which are services by ECI cabinets
On top of the DSL problems with ECI, there are also constant "micro dropouts" of PPP service caused at the exchange head end.
Essentially the devices are hot garbage - can't do vectoring (when they tried, the DSLAMS would crash uncontrollably), can't do g.inp (when they tried the DSLAMS would crash uncontrollably), can't provide GPON or 300Mb/s service and the headends are reputedly fragile as hell, dropping packets all over the show.
As many observers have noted, people don't so much "get" service from ECI cabinets but "Suffer from" it (the many and varied issues are well known within the industry)
BT __WAS_ in the process of (slowly) replacing all their ECI cabinets with Huawei ones, when a "certain foreign government" politically interfered in the process
"Also depends if they can get planning permission to replace"
Planning permission for cabinets is only needed in 2% of cabinets in the UK (mostly conservation areas and AONBs - and even there it's very hard for councils to refuse it)
There are ways of dealing with problem neigbours like this. Grass seed figures highly in these "ways"
The problem is that everything they do costs a fortune. One of their blokes told me that to make a concrete plinth for an FTTC cabinet, put the cabinet on the plinth and run a mains supply to it 'costs' £50,000. The total lack of value delivered by these clowns is amazing.
I live in a very rural part of Wales and broadband is always an issue here with overhead cabling etc. I switched to Zen from Demon when Vodafone took them over. Demon support was excellent and, I have to say, that Zen's customer support has always been excellent too. (No I do not work for them!).
I currently get 18Mbps on an FTTC connection and it does rise and fall with the weather for sure, but our proximity to the sea does add another corrosion dimension to the ageing BT cabling. And we are used to water issues....
The rest of my family are with other providers suck as Talk Talk, Virgin, Vodafone and Sky. Sky is the best of this bunch and Talk Talk are rubbish.
"and it does rise and fall with the weather for sure,"
Then you need to flag this as it's not within spec. Properly sealed joints/undamaged cable are immune to "weather issues" despite what 'former British Leyland staff/manglement' might say in an effort to convince you otherwise
> Can we not put all the eggs in the openreach basket?
Starlink terminals are already operating in the UK (beta test)
They're now taking advance signups for full service at starlink.com - It's a £85 fully refindable deposit for service going live in mid-late 2021
Having thousands of people signup for it regardkless of rurality(*) enables Starlink to issue press releases saying they've got thousands of people signed up (and not all of them are in rural loactions!)
(*) You don't need to be in a rural location to signup for Starlink, but the pricing makes them think it's better suited for rural customers unable to get cheap broadband, They forget that "reliability/customer service" factors can easily outweigh terrestrial supply from a histile telco
This makes for a fairly cheap way of scaring the hell out of BT Openreach - and in a way that they can't put out of business or buy legislation to block like they did with WISPs rolling out broadband in rural areas in the late 2000s/early 2010s
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I have been with Zen Internet since BT Broadband failed to provide a workable service in the early noughties. Same line, same cabinet ever since - the breaks in a decade I can count on one hand. More importantly speedtests show my connection beating other Openreach dependent ISPs customers on the same exchange. They do seem to be able to squeeze more bits down the line and keep their end of the line up more than most. That's why I pay a premium.
The question here is whether other ISPs routing to customers through that cabinet should be suffering too. Is there a union of ISPs to gang up on their monopoly supplier to get it fixed? Trying to be competitive through a soggy box is useless to all. Individually they can be easily fobbed off but together they can make viable threats - aka 'request for service or we don't pay'.
Or don't TalkTalk customers spot any difference from normal service? (sorry Dido, I couldn't resist that cheap jibe in memory of you).
"don't TalkTalk customers spot any difference from normal service? "
Openreach has "pink contracts" with the later resellers where they contractually "opt out" of the legally requitred response times in exchange for lower charges
This is WHY TalkTalk tell you it will take 7-14 days for Openreach to come out and 8 days between missed appointments(*) when a smaller ISP will have them out the next day and within 4 hours of a failed appointment.
(*) I gave up on Talktalk after they took 2 1/2 years and 13 "no shows" to not setup my VDSL in the first place. The replacement (Phone Coop) was extremely good and had VDSL service workng within 12 hours of the first failed appointment.
The problem is that all the good phone.coop tech staff resigned from there more or less simultaneously about 2 years ago, making a change of ISP necessary (so did a number of their directors in protest of what was going on)
Unfortunately I chose Zen based on customer reviews which are clearly out of date.
AAISP are good, but their data caps make it a non-starter...
Virgin's local cabinets tend to spend most of their time sitting around with innards exposed to weather and passing oiks who like to rip out cables, so they're a non-starter too (that's on top of any contention ratio issues)
"I am paying for 80Mbps service and am currently getting 16Mb/s with loads of DSL carrier drops."
No you aren't. No CP currently or has ever sold such a package. The complainant is paying for an up to 80Mb/s connection. The technology will provide a data connection that is rate adapted to their telephone line up to a theoretical maximum of 80Mb/s on the best lines.
16Mb/s in and of itself fits that description and merely indicates a relatively high level of electrical resistance (a long line or perhaps aluminium involved). However the frequent drops should not be happening and indicate a fault that Zen ought to be able to report to Openreach. Fixing that issue would eventually increase the complainant's speed. Whether it would ever get as high as 80Mb/s depends on their particular line's electrical resistance and to a lesser extent on the amount of electrical interference it is subject to.
In the meantime the complainant could ask Zen to drop them down to a 40/10 service so as to save some money.
"16Mb/s in and of itself fits that description and merely indicates a relatively high level of electrical resistance (a long line or perhaps aluminium involved). "
When did 180 metres become a long line? (external cable comes into the building and terminates in a NT5 block with a single item plugged into it, no internal cabling. That block's been replaced 4 times in the last 17 years but no change - of course). I can almost read the numbers stencilled on the DSLAM cabinets from my front window
I know it's lead sheathed paper in this area because I've stuck my head in the cabinets a few times when Openreach guys have been onsite. The older guys are more than happy for customers to see how bad things are (there's a notable air leak in the lead sheathing too with the pressure gauges almost at zero) whilst the newer ones are frequently openly hostile to anyone displaying telecoms engineering & design qualiifications (my hypothesis is that they feel threatened)
The funny part is that the router (fritzbox) is currently reporting a 27 metre bridge tap on some days, a 7 metre bridge tap on others (Depending on the weather it decreases as things dry out) - but BTOR's 'techs' "Can't find anything wrong with the cable" - which made for an interesting discussion yesterday when I asked about the reported bridge tap on the line(*)
(*) Bridge taps are not much of a problem on voice circuits, but on DSL lines they can act as a half/quarter-wave shorted stub segment and wipe out usability of entire frequency bands - DSL has a lot more in common with RF engineering than people realise - this is why it's so critical they're traced and eliminated. In an area with 50+ year old street distributors, this is more of a problem than people might realise, particularly when cowboys without RF training start playing "Musical cable pairs"
This is a constant problem across the industry in many countries if you use "contractors" who are paid to close tickets as quickly as possible and each complaint is raised as a new fault with no link to cable or pair history.
It becomes a nice earner for contractors to "farm" a faulty cable in an area as easy income and play "musical chairs" with the good/bad pairs between distirbution pits. When I ran an ISP in New Zealand I was able to collate customer complaints, pointing my Telco sales rep to clusters of faults in small areas which would otherwise not be dealt with - this resulted in making "enemies" out of a number of contracting firms in smaller towns who saw their "easy income" drop by 80-90% when old crufty cable runs were replaced
I have to say that not ALL BTOR tech staff are awful - many older ex-BT staff care deeply about quality of service, but they're vastly outnumbered by cowboy cheapies who only care about closing tickets as quickly as possible so they get paid
It was one of these older (EX GPO/BT) guys who reported finding the water damage in the DSLAM and commented on the "well known" issues with water leaks in the ECI cabinets. Openreach have been vehemently denying this was ever stated but I kept an audio recording of the call
Unfortunately , his work in redoing all the joints and replacing jumpers lasted about 6 weeks until the last round of bad weather in this part of the country (a big problem for intermittent weather-related faults is that BTOR don't show up for severa days after a fault is reported, giving time for wet lines to try out - particularly in areas prone to flash surface flooding like this one)
I'd already passed his provided information to Zen and warned that the "fix" would last about as long as it took for the next round of wet weather (which is the same warning he gave). They chose to brush that off and then pull this last boneheaded stunt
---
On the bright side: I had a call and apoloigy from Denise at Zen's High Level Complaints. Amongst other comments it seems that:
- There were a number of "quite inappropriate comments" seen on the internal ticketing system
- my formal requests for DSO and Zen CEO complaint escalation were noted on a number of previous occasions but killed by the broadband fault group manager
- I'm not the only one who's raised such reuests which were not passed on
I get the impression that someone's been "shepherding" their fault rates to look good to senior management. Now they've noticed this could get "interesting"
I've seen a cabinet replaced after a lorry drove through one ripping it from the ground and converting it to a shredded mess of components. Now, I am not suggesting getting someone with a JCB to drive through it. Or a can of petrol to end up in the wrong place. That would lead to no broadband for a few days... but it surely can't lead to a worse cabinet.
Maybe call it Customer Upgrade Options.
Actually, the funny part of that road accident issue was my client was using TalkTalk. They had to watch EVERYONE ELSE in her block of flats get their lines replaced. And only once everyone else was online did TalkTalk get their turn. I think that was the Dido era.
The thing I like about Zen is at least they tell you like it is. Openreach have everyone by the balls and they know it. At least Zen don't hide that pain behind some Quality BS.
Zen's idea of "telling it like it is" is to put a message on their website saying their service is so good that people are flocking in and overwhelming their poor overworked support staff:
> COVID-19 has sparked a flight to quality and increased importance on reliable connectivity which is keeping us busy here at Zen. We are experiencing significantly increased call and email volumes.
...really?
A one star review on Trustpilot detailing the complain resulted in conact coming back from "hig level complaints" within 2 hours
I've been trying to get Zen to raise it to high level complaints internally since Novermber
Paul Stobart came later
It appears companies care about bad reviews. Who knew?
As an additional piece of information: I'm only 180 cable run metres form the cabinet, to get 16M/4.9 when things start playing up. At these distances one should be able to sustain 100MB/s on a piece of wet string.
The problem is openwretch and their crass attitude to faults. If there's an intermittent problem or an HR (high resistance) fault that their diagnostics don't find, you're not going to get anywhere. They won't investigate unless your speed goes quite a bit below the 'maximum' (actually I would have thought 16Mbps qualifies).
The whole problem is due to their continuing to sell copper products. Most people I know who think they have fibre don't - it's just fibre to the cabinet and copper from there to the property. Copper may be good when you're near the cabinet and the wiring and wiring cabinet are fairly new, but if you live in the wrong place, you'll get rubbish broadband.
I know we're making progress, but it's slow. We need more fibre not just for the speed, but for the consistent speed, and the reliability.
We supply broadband to about 50 business customers, and we've found that whilst the good circuits are OK, the bad circuits just keep having problem after problem.
It's about time the government stepped in and took this more seriously. Decent broadband is more important than projects like HS2 for example, to my mind.
"The problem is openwretch and their crass attitude to faults. "
Yup. and they have ISPs by the short and curlies regarding fault reporting/fixing
Oh Hi? Elon? What's that? 100/20M on 24ms latency without microdropouts for the same pricing as AAISP but without caps?
Yes please. Here's my £85 100% refundable deposit for service availablity in mid-late 2021 and I know I'll need to find £250 more to buy the dish when you offer it.
Yes, Starlink forces the issue in many cases where bad service for wired persists. This is one of their main selling points - the US in particular has huge areas served by dreadful wired comms with no intention for their owners to invest and upgrade.
As the service improves it could well supercede wired capability. If they can keep latencies down where those applications are critical.
I suspect there's a reason why there are tentative steps from other space operators and governments to setting up their own networks. (Competition is good. Kessler syndrome isn't...)
"The whole problem is due to their continuing to sell copper products"
The REAL problem is that THE SAME company is selling dialtone and lines (vertically integrated monopoly)
The secondary problem is that this is a COMPETITION AND MARKETS issue, not an Ofcom one
When New Zealand took steps to deal with the rapacious monopoly there, Telecom New Zealand tried to sell the BT/Openreach model.
The New Zealand "telecommunications reguator" took the parrotlike response of there being no problem with the market.
The New Zealand Ministry of Commerce detailed how the abusive monopoly in NZ was costing 5-10% of GDP due to telco "rent-seeking" behaviour and then dissected the massive UK market abuse perpetuated by British Telecom using their "Openreach" sock puppet (including BTOR's destruction of EU broadband Notspot funding initiatives via WISPs by announcing DSL rollouts in areas - blocking release of EU funds - where WISPs had setup, but not actually providing DSL until the WISPs had gone bankrupt and were no longer a threat)
One of the things hghlighted was that although there are "Chinese walls" in place, BT Head Office can look over the top of both and was directing Openreach operations in ways to maximise advantage fcor BT whilst maximising disadvantage for competitors - this is WHY there was no DSL offering in the wharf districts of London for many years - providing DSL products would have cannabilised BT's extremely profitable digital leased lines in the area
The NZ MoC concluded that the only safe way forward was to breakup the telco - using the proffered BT/OPenreach (TNZ in NZ became "Spark"/"Chorus" in anticipation of their proposal being rubberstamped) model but cleaving the companies into completrely separate services/lines entities with separate shareholding, boards and physical offices. The exact same objections about pensions and liabiltiies were raised as have been raised inthe UK - but what happened next is telling.
Without the dead hand of "Head Office" holding them back, Chorus(openreach) started actively marketing themselves, cables and custs to all comers - imagine Openreach letting Virgin run feeds up their ducts in the UK as one example. The ISP and dialtone market also exploded, taking NZ from a poster child of HOW NOT to privatise your post office telco to one of the most competitive markets in the world (once upon a time it would cost $9k/month for a T1 circuit from San Francisco to Auckland, and $6k/month to get it across town, or $60k/month to drop it in a town 200 miles away. Now that crosstown circuit is $100 or so and intercity links not much more expensive)
In the UK, BT still own the lines as well as providing services and they're still acting as a rapacious monopoly dictating terms to the customer ISPs
American midwest monoply telcos are now panicing wildly about Starlink with a lot of smear advertising about quality of service and pricing starting to appear (which people are having fun picking apart). BT should start worrying that the same thing is about to happen here
That smearing is happening here too. Zen's response when I mentioned that I've signed up for Starlink was to try and claim it suffered from 1500+ms latencies and low speeds, etc.
A lot of people will take Starlink simply because IT IS NOT the telco, thanks to years of abuse.
This is seen in New Zealand where "Spark" (the telco) lost huge percentages of its dialtone custom to competitors and is now struggling badly. Chorus is heavily regulated in terms of "equal access" and an attempt by Spark to get preferential treatment post breakup resulted in them being stomped on - hard
As for HOW the NZ telco was broken up:
- when the MoC proposed it, Telecom NZ went into full legal porcupine mode
This was circumvented by simply making any further broadband rollout funding contingent on a breakup occurring. Faced with losing $2billion in income TCNZ rolled over and played dead on the spot
Interestingly, the FUD about how bad Chorus would be and how great Spark was resulted in Chorus shares dropping by 30% on the first day of issue and being heavily sold off by newly imnted owners (TCNZ shares were split into Chorus/Spark shares when the company was broken up)
Within 2 weeks Spark's credit rating had been degraded, their share price had dropped and share price of Chorus was higher than initial issue. The trolls who'd been running Chorus pricing down prior to the breakup made out like bandits(*). Meantime Chorus had no problem whatsoever raising money to rollout network upgrades
(*) There were clear elements of attempting to do so in order to gain controlling interests in Chorus by hoovering up cheap shares but as a critical public service entity, Chorus ownership and controlling interests are strictly controlled. Anyone submarining lots of share buys would be forced to divest them as soon as they surfaced with ownership over the threshold or if the submarining methods were exposed as traceable back to one owner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorus_Limited
New Zealand has a higher public subsidy and a lower average broadband speed than the U.K.
Plenty of U.K. Comms provider’s don’t use BT’s dial tone and deliver their own service. Lots of U.K. ISPs have their own dsl racks in exchanges. You don’t have to buy dialtone to get a broadband service.
Virgin reach most U.K. homes with their own network and dial tone. Hardly a monopoly. There are also 3 cellphone outfits not owned by BT.
Ofcom set the terms of Openreach’s service, not BT.
Your rant is fact free. I hope you don’t actually teach telecoms.
The problem is openwretch and their crass attitude to faults. If there's an intermittent problem or an HR (high resistance) fault that their diagnostics don't find, you're not going to get anywhere. They won't investigate unless your speed goes quite a bit below the 'maximum' (actually I would have thought 16Mbps qualifies).
It's not just copper causing fun. I'm on a fibre service with BT (retail) and the phone's been down a couple of weeks. There online diagnostics thingy apparently says my broadband is fine. Yep, it is, it's the ATA that's kaput. No dial tone. The TEL1 light is in darkness. No power from the ATA to my 284/2. The ATA has gone the way of a matchbox sized parrot, so just mail me another one & I'll swap it out.
Given how many years I've spent in telecomms, this shouldn't entirely suprise me. But I am now wondering if it's the Huawei thing given the ATA is one of their parts.
" I'm on a fibre service with BT (retail) and the phone's been down a couple of weeks. "
So, phone up Ofcom and tell them BT are breaching their service obligations
Or just document it. note the applicable compensation rates and file on moneyclaimonline (The UK courts small claims service)
Getting served wiill wake them up. BT don't want you to be able to issue a press release saying you won compensation in small claims for rotten service
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice-for-consumers/costs-and-billing/automatic-compensation-need-know
You can claim £8/day of loss of service, plus the filing fees plus "reasonable rates" for appearing/waiting at court if needed (travel and £50/hour)
It adds up fast
What's telling is this:
"If your broadband or landline service stops working, you will simply have to report the fault to your provider. If the service is not fixed after two full working days , you would not need to ask for compensation or contact your provider again, as your provider has systems in place that mean you will start receiving compensation automatically if the repair takes too long.
You will receive an initial £8 if the service is not fixed two full working days after you report it, and then £8 for each full day it is still not fixed after that."
The fact that they HAVEN'T provided automatic compensation is another claim strike point in the filing - and having that noted in a court decision where they can't hide it is the kind of thing that (eventually) makes regulators put on their stompy boots
(I can see BT trying to "weasel" by claiming that the landline is fine, it's equipment that's the problem. Judges in civil courts are not stupid and "no dialtone" + "Inability to make phone calls" should make for a pretty convincing "loss of service" argument)
Hmm, excellent points. I'd forgotten about that Ofcom change.
In the past, when I designed a couple of these kinds of networks, ATAs were always a concern given safety-of-life considerations, and many ATAs having little or no remote diagnostic capability. Some did, so could be hooked into automatic fault detection systems, but those can't always detect all faults. It also got fun if the voice service was intended as being provisioned via the router rather than traditional copper broadband + filter given that put a dependency on the router.
But I shall remind them of their obligations, and see if that focuses their mind. If not, as you say that compensation starts adding up. Then I'll be curious to see if it results in Openreach swapping out the Huawei GPON NID for another vendor.
The "Weasel" I see is them claiming that THEIR equipment in YOUR home falls under "equipment in your home" exemption
This is the part where a judge will eviscerate them. It's a loophole caused by OFCOM which shouldn't be there. You don't control it and it's essential for service - BT kit, not yours
The problem here is identifying what is a 'stops working' service. Providing 50Mbps instead of 80 that you used to have until a bit of water got into a junction box is still 'service' as far as openretch are concerned. Providing 20Mbps when all your neighbours can get 60 is still 'service' too. And having to pay extra for FTTC just to give you 20 / 1 when ADSL gives you 5 / 0.5 and someone down the road gets 20/1 on ADSL is rather unfair. Having to pay extra for FTTP is also unfair, especially if the VDSL either doesn't exist or is poor.
If openreach had to provide service based not on the tech used, but on the speed available using the best tech, then they'd start to invest more into full fibre, because ultimately it'll be cheaper to maintain.
In other words, if I want an 80/20 service and VDSL can't provide it, they should either charge much less, or charge for an 80 / 20 line and put fibre in.
Maybe I'm talking bollocks but quite honestly, the inequality of speeds is so great that something drastic needs to be done.
" Providing 50Mbps instead of 80 that you used to have until a bit of water got into a junction box is still 'service' as far as openretch are concerned."
The problem which goes with this is that it's not JUST a slowdown of service, but a shedload of "microdropouts" that occur due to retransmissions
the effect can be that OpenWound say "the line is perfect" but you can't play "Among Us"(*) because of constant UDP ping loss, or your x2go sessions keep dropping(**) out whilst the SSH sessions they run on top of stay intact.
DSL and VDSL are a series of QAM RF carriers running between 0 to 8/17/34MHz, where each carrier is essentialy a separate "modem". They're all susceptable to noise and oxidised joints cause all sorts of problems with carrier intermodulation in ways that people who'd operated landmobile hilltop stations are very painfully aware of
(*) This game is very low bandwidth but _extremely_ sensitive to packet loss. i've found it's a good "canary in the coal mine"
(**) This is my REAL gripe. I NEED remote windowing sessions for "work from home" and I'm paying for a premium grade service so I _can_ work from home. Having these sessions constantly falling over due to packet loss makes for a "not fun day". Getting brushed off by the ISP isn't just annoying, it's offensive when you've been assured that this stuff will be taken seriously before you signed up, having flagged the issues existed before signing in.
My experience is quite the reverse. Openreach respond to established faults reported by the ISP. My ISP was brilliant, Openreach spend days fixing faults and did fix all of them.
My supicion is that some ISP's hide behind openreach to escape responsibility.
someone's gone through and downvoted every single criticism of Zen and Openreach
It says far more about the way they object to being publicaly spanked than anything else
You do realise that ElReg forum curators can see all your details nicluding your IP address, don't you sweetie?
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Whle the complaint handling obviously was questionable (at least initially) on Zen's part; the equipment causing the problem here is OpenReach's remit. The "up-to" marketing garbage is a default excuse for fleecing by all ISPs. The regulators remain relatively toothless to do anything about it.
Talk of Huawei and fibre cabinets... Nobody else make something similar? And if not, why not? Doesn't sound like a particularly manpower intensive production line to me, the sort of thing that could be done without shipping everything from the far east. (And as shipping prices have exploded into the stratosphere even more argument to do so).
"Whle the complaint handling obviously was questionable (at least initially) on Zen's part;"
Zen's behaviour on this is virtually identical to all the other ISPs - deny, deflect and evade
The whole thing smacks of Openreach threatening ISPs with dire consequences if they don't toe the oifficial line
We are on a BT VDSL connection in a rural area. When our broadband died in the village for two weeks in the middle of last year’s lockdown and home schooling, BT sent us a mobile router. Taking the SIM out of this and putting it into my ASUS VDSL modem&router demonstrated speeds of 50Mb down /50Mb uplink. Faster than the VDSL at 30/8. It was almost a pity to go back to VDSL when they switched it back on, particularly on the upload part.
Moved my mother-in-law's property to Zen 11 months ago. First time broadband operating, but every year about this time the telephone line has issues. So this year was no different (lost dial-tone and/or constantly engaged signal). Broadband on and off.
Connections used for feed from cameras to keep an eye on her and carers etc.
Called Zen and they ran a line test - result - a fault in the property. Explained we get the same issue every year for 20 odd years. They would not budge. It would be £130.00 to fix the cabling inside the property. I had no choice but to agree to this charge. Appointment for 2 days time (Wednesday).
The case was then prioritised due to a vulnerable person etc. and the engineer arrived 2 hours later. Came it put tester on line and told us the fault was 85 metres away. He went off and then came back two hours later having pulled about 100 metres of cable across two fields and a stream to reconnect the service. No charge of course.
Just a shame that Zen were so adamant about where the fault was.
I've always just okayed the potential charges when they say they'll apply if the fault is in the internal wiring.
It's never been charged on any of the 60 or so DSL circuits I used to manage - 40 odd with Zen, 15 odd with A&A and 5 or so with Plusnet.
Weirdest was finding out my own copper pair has been clipped off in the manhole outside the flat so that the run from the manhole to the cabinet could be reused for someone else. I still had broadband, but no dial tone ..... 4 days after by dsl was provisioned :-(
I've had simultaneous cease/provides go hairy and weird problems when rural overhead lines have been cut and repaired (including putting a dacs into a line that didnt have it previously) and every time, 'yes I'll accept the charges'.
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