Scottish broadband service looking a bit dreich, says UK outage study

Broadband subscribers in Scotland suffer the most outages in the UK, according to Broadband Genie, with customers of BT typically experiencing the fewest. The internet comparison site says it analyzed 3,200 subscriber contracts around the country, and bases its league table on the number of outages lasting more than 48 hours …

[Wally Dug]

Compensation Get Out Clauses

However, this only kicks in once the service has been non-functioning for two full working days, and offers just £9.98 ($13.41) for each day it remains unrepaired afterwards.

And for Virgin, you have to call and register that your broadband is affected, even if the automated service confirms that your service is affected - stay on the line and press the appropriapate key to register it. And if it comes back as part of testing? The clock resets and you have to re-register that it's down again.

Bitter? Not me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Remote communities/islands and Openreach "engineers"

It's probably worse in remote communities and islands where there seems to be one "engineer" who keeps disconnecting lines at the cabinet, presumably whilst trying to connect someone else, and it then takes weeks to explain to Openreach via Plusnet/BT and have it resolved. And then it happens again every so often, presumably because someone else got disconnected in order to re-connect your original service, and so on. And it takes months of pursuing Plusnet/BT to get part of the compensation due for the loss of service and then you give up because it's not worth the time. Go on, ask me how I know this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Remote communities/islands and Openreach "engineers"

I did some contracting on one of the remote islands. We needed a pair of 2Mb lines from BT to a remote site. The local BT engineer was a great guy; helpful, understood the requirements, sorted the design out, got the contract signed (harder than it sounds). Then the fun started. Openreach were crap throughout the installation and whenever they were on site I had to have one of the local team with them all the time to make sure they dug in the right place, put the pits in the right place, respected access, etc. The BT guy was most apologetic but said that once BT handed off the contract to Openreach (they were part of BT at the time) then they were as unaccountable as they were when dealing with Joe Public. It was impossible to get dates for when stuff was going to be done. I wasn't allowed to deal directly with Openreach and by the time the BT guy had passed on my questions and got answers back it was usually too late.

[AndrueC]

Re: Remote communities/islands and Openreach "engineers"

Openreach (they were part of BT at the time)

They still are. Both Openreach and BT Consumer/Business are part of BT Group.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Remote communities/islands and Openreach "engineers"

Or like one open reach engineer admitted "off the record" that open reach engineers will do this (and mark the exchange and cabs) to "punish" customers who are "difficult"at times leaving the line disconnected for weeks under spurious excuses, that management are WELL aware this happens and will turn a blind eye and deny this has happened.....

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Remote communities/islands and Openreach "engineers"

It's a long time ago but when I used to see the BT in-house magazine the evidence for a reality distortion field was exceedingly strong - as was the field. The rag would have manglement-written pieces about how wonderful a system they were running and the letters pages would be full of complaints about how the broken system stopped them from doing their jobs and offering a good service. Assuming such a thing still exists I'd expect the same thing today.

[Headley_Grange]

Re: Compensation Get Out Clauses

It's possible to benefit from BT's incompetence. My internet went down and was fixed in a couple of days but their system paid me out for 16 days of outage. I tried to tell them but there isn't an option in the automated fault reporting process for "You over-compensated me and I'd like to return it" so I gave up.

[R Soul]

Re: Compensation Get Out Clauses

I wouldn't worry about that. BT will make sure you get their promised 16 days of outages - and then some.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Is there any part of the planet where the broadband isn't rubbish ?

I would have thought specifying outages per 100 GBP might have risk invoking national stereotypes in the case of Scotland.

After all a 100 punds is a 100 punds. 0.67 outages per £100 so one outages then ? ;)

Curious why Glasgow topped 0.94 — do the hard men regularly give the cabinets a good kickin' ?

Mine's a Hunting Stuart.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is there any part of the planet where the broadband isn't rubbish ?

"Curious why Glasgow topped 0.94 — do the hard men regularly give the cabinets a good kickin' ?"

If you ever visited Glasgow, you wouldn't need to ask that question. Aside from the local population's recreational use those the cabinets, the Glasgow climate is a hostile environment for any open-air electronics and street furniture.

[Evil Scot]

Re: Is there any part of the planet where the broadband isn't rubbish ?

Royal. Polyviscose I'm of Aberdonian stock FFS.

[Scotech]

Per £100?

So if BT regularly charge more than their competitors, they get a better score?

[Ken Shabby]

Re: Per £100?

True dat

[Doctor Syntax]

Given the reasons for outages it's a bit of a strange basis for comparison. An outage a few months ago was caused by rainwater getting into our connection so only ourselves experienced the outage (and PlusNet refunded automatically) but the one before that was caused by a failure of power to the cabinet so customers of all suppliers using it would have been affected. The same a few years ago when our daughter's local cabinet was taken out by a car crash.

[Ian Johnston]

I have FTTP at home in a fairly remote Scottish village. It's an Openreach line with A&A as ISP. I get on average four or five outages a year, rarely for more than five two minutes and almost all in the middle of the night. There has only been one significant outage since I was hooked up in 2019; a couple of daytime hours earlier this year.

Note: The singular of "data" is "anecdote".

[Anonymous Coward]

Wildlife

I blame flocks of wild haggis chewing through the cables.

[AMBxx]

Re: Wildlife

I believe the correct collective noun is 'stooshie'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wildlife

Thanks

I wasn’t sure.

[kinrossian]

Until independence is achieved, Scotland will always be a subset of England! FTS!

[Ken Hagan]

You mis-spelled Cheltenham

"The city with the lowest level is Gloucester, where customers experience 0.02 outages for every £100 they spend, ..."

Yeah, I can imagine that ISPs make a special effort in that part of the country. Don't want to piss off the wrong people now, do we?