What is the point of unrealistic dates on the checker?

I am referring to the dates on the BT wholesale checker, my cabinet was due to go live March 2013 (yes 2013) however the dates have constantly been moved forward sometimes by one month and a time and sometimes three months at a time. The new date is September 2014 (18 months after the original date) do I believe that date? not really it would be more helpful to not have a date then just putting a new date every time the old one expires.

The date shows its on the to-do list.
Would you prefer do date?

The political pressure is not for your cab to be enabled, but to get coverage as high as possible as soon as possible. That has been the thrust of criticism from NAO/PAC in addition to value for money, which has meant that it is really just a numbers game, which works nicely for BT too, since the more complex cabinets can be avoided as they do concentrate on lots of others.

My Cabinet has just been put back again from today. Was meant to be live a year ago, like yours, then March 2014, now June 2014. Maybe i will be on Fibre by Christmas lol

Edited by Chalkyman (Fri 28-Mar-14 11:53:11)

I just do not see the point of having a date which is very likely to be moved all the time, to me there is no sense in it.

What irks me more then anything I put the question to BT before asking is the March date realistic as I live in rented property I could easily just move to a house on the next street which is fibre enabled. They told me they were very optimistic that it would be by the end of March...

if its a house move choice then the only certainty is a property with the service actually already running in it, then you can check what speeds they get.

Not sure everyone would agree about the no date being better

In reply to a post by colic:

I just do not see the point of having a date which is very likely to be moved all the time, to me there is no sense in it.

What irks me more then anything I put the question to BT before asking is the March date realistic as I live in rented property I could easily just move to a house on the next street which is fibre enabled. They told me they were very optimistic that it would be by the end of March...

I totally agree with this. My cabinet has just been put back from March to September, and I e-mailed NGA Enquiries in January as was told mid-March. When I first started checking my cabinet last year it too was March 2013 (I first checked in Q1 2013).

There's absolutely no point putting a date for it to be consistently moved forward as soon as the date approaches. All it does (for me) is build resentment as, without having any other info to go on, it looks like BT/Openreach are either very lax at planning or don't give a monkeys about giving customers (both current and potentially new - i.e. me!) accurate information.

#rantover

Poll should start on Saturday about this

Should Openreach NOT publish an estimated service date for a cabinet, until it is 100% certain the cabinet will go live by the set date?

Yes
No
Not Sure
No Opinion

Plus two questions about ISP info and council info

I think perhaps they should not give a date until they are 100% certain of when it will be live, but they should give an indication of whether a cabinet is planned to be upgraded or not, with an indication of what stage they are at if it is planned.

I agree with this point of view. The rest of my town was deployed on FTTC 2 years ago. It was rumoured that the lines on my cab would get FTTP but there was no official indication of this at all with only ADSL showing up until Tuesday of this week when FTTP availability suddenly appeared. So an indication of the plan with no date would make sense until a fairly certain date can be added.

The checker is rather dull and boring lay out. BT should addition extra on it eg: estimated date, description of job/date and further updating while the planning is current process.