In reply to a post by kitcat:

23prince

There is no physical work so the whole upgrade is automated. However as BTretail and Openreach's systems are completely seperate the change will be out of synch. Example; OR does their changes after midnight and to prevent any suggestions of discrimination waits until all that days changes are complete before passing all completion message to all service providers. These then update their systems and when all the changes are done in all the equipment your service then works again! The whole proccess should be 'No touch' but if a customer notices during the break a fault gets raised manually but won't be cleared until someone looks at it ( manually).

When the system was designed each OR completion was passed on to the service provider as it completed BUT this led to complaints that some customers were done before others ( First come first served, but some providers bulked their requests at the end of the day) This is the outcome of forced equivilence after changing the system to make it less discriminatory.