Kelly FTTC install

Been waiting most of the afternoon for the engineer to come and install our fttc connection. When he finally arrived he told us that he was only a telephone engineer and knew nothing about broadband. Great! He was from Kelly's. He was at our house for barely 20 mins, complained about other jobs he had to do before going home. I mentioned that we had star wiring which was in the loft and that none of the sockets downstairs appeared to be a master? He said he wasn't insured to go in anyone's loft, didn't have time to inspect any wiring, and wouldn't disconnect the extension wiring. In short he did very little. He changed the socket in the lounge to an NT5E socket and that was that. I thought that the master socket should have an NTE5 fitted? None of our three sockets appear to be a master. Told me that the speeds we were getting were 40 down and 10 up. Yeah, right. We are 1.34km (under a mile) from the cabinet, there is no way we would get anywhere that speed. I said that was wrong and he said that was what his equipment said. I asked what the SNR and attenuation were and he said what's that! Our speed is 4.7mbs down and 1.15mbs up. We connected at over 7mbs with Max adsl and downloaded at over 6! I am pretty sure that our fttc speed should be better than what we are currently getting.

Phoned Zen who will arrange for another engineer to come out, hopefully a broadband engineer this time. Am I being unreasonable here? I expected a broadband engineer and someone who understood and knew what they were doing. Think I have worn my poor hubby's ears out.

Anyone else had this problem? What happened? Any help/advice much appreciated. Regards, Marie.

Kelly's messed up my parents install and left them without a voice service after changing an extension socket which I had ran off the master socket years ago to the bedroom and changed that to the master the old master was then disconnected (which has the house phone connected to it!)

Rang BT and an openreach guy turned up first thing the next morning to sort it out!

In reply to a post by whisper:

Phoned Zen who will arrange for another engineer to come out, hopefully a broadband engineer this time. Am I being unreasonable here? I expected a broadband engineer and someone who understood and knew what they were doing. Think I have worn my poor hubby's ears out.

Anyone else had this problem? What happened? Any help/advice much appreciated. Regards, Marie.

In theory, it shouldn't matter if it's Kelly on behalf of Openreach, or Openreach direct. Sadly in practice it does often matter, as a lot of the Kelly engineers are plain lazy, whilst others are just disincentivised to care - mostly because they are given pretty pathetic earnings as I understand it and thus anything tricky (eg. time consuming) won't happen.

Either way, it's not your problem... and you're not being unreasonable. Call your ISP (Zen as you suggested I guess), and it's down to them to speak to Openreach and sort.

Kelly engineers are useless... specially in situations where there is more than just a master socket...

I had one once, I could actually see that he was confused by the setup which was simply... Master socket with another cable going out to extension and another cable already tapped together to pass though another phoneline...

All he had to do was replace older NTE5 with newer one... and then he put the ring wire (which was never wired in the first place) into 5 where one of the blues should of been...

I told him to just leave the extensions, and I would do it... he then chuckled and said you won't have the right tool and then had a look of despair when I drop a tool bag in from of him full of different cables, connectors and all the relevance tools and testers...

and then accused me of having a stolen toner set... but then gave up on that quickly when I pointed out that it wasn't marked by BT or anyone else and also asked who his belonged too... knowing that it would say BT and not Kelly!

That's a completely duff installation .

Didn't Zen give you an estimate at the time you ordered?

Put your phone number into this checker anyway, and copy/paste the FTTC A and FTTC B lines. We don't need a picture.

Yeap get back onto zen and be polite but moan alas kelly's are known for being less than perfect worry for those who want faster rollout is they would be used even more.

If zen hit a stonewall can moan to openreach direct

RobertoS, thanks for your reply.

The estimate from Zen was up to 9mbps (impacted).

High Low High Low
FTTC Range A (Clean) 15.5 9.2 1.2 0.8 -- Available
FTTC Range B (Impacted) 11.7 3.8 1.2 0.5 -- Available

I was hoping the download would be around 10 but would be happy with anything above the 7.3 mbps sync speed of Max ADSL. Currently the download speed has dropped to 3.7 Mbps but the upload is 1.2 Mbps. Not being able to see any of the modem stats is a real pain.

What I don't understand is if the download speed is impacted why isn't the upload speed, doesn't make sense to me.

I think when Openreach remove the star wiring you should see close to the estimated speed. The star wiring can have a huge effect on the speed and Kelly's are absolutely supposed to be removing it.

A good Openreach engineer should also be reporting the Kelly's guy, they basically take some pictures and then the Kelly's guy gets the £25 taken back off him. Hopefully that should incentivise him not to do it again! One would hope anyway.

Needs someone to remove the star wiring, only then will you stand a chance of seeing better speeds, VDSL2 is a lot more sensitive to those wiring issues. If ISP cannot get things moving then email me and will see if someone can be prodded into action.

Thanks Mr Saffron, will do. I spoke to Zen this morning and they have raised this as a fault. They will ring me when they have a date for the engineer to come, which will hopefully be soon. Regards, Marie.

You should get a real Openreach engineer this time, and every one I have ever had has been excellent .

Let us know how things go.

Just got a phone call, engineer is booked to come tomorrow a.m. Will let you know what happens.

Well, we did get an Openreach engineer and a really good one at that. Really pleasant and courteous and obviously knew his job. Arrived at 8.30 a.m. left at just after 11.00. Star wiring has been disconnected. The cable coming into the loft was unpinned from the outside wall, taken down and pinned along the front of the house going into the lounge under the window where he fitted an NT5E socket. He told us what he recommended and we went along with it. Nothing was too much trouble for him and we are delighted. Had to ask next door neighbour's permission for him to put his ladder in their garden to gain access to the side of our house where phone cable was but that wasn't a problem. When he tested the speed using his equipment we were sync'd at 21.74 down, 1.2 up, SNR 6, attenuation 30.5. Using our BT modem (ECI) and Asus router sync is 16.83 down, 1.17 up, downloading at 16.32.

Just wondered though whether by matching the chip in the modem to the chip in the dslam (think that's the right terminology) would we sync any higher and is there a way of finding out what chip is in the there, or does it really matter?

Thank you all so much for your help. Much appreciated. Marie.

Result!

Rather better than you ever hoped for in fact .

In reply to a post by whisper:

Think I have worn my poor hubby's ears out.

Are they better now?

Absolutely, very pleased. Hubby's ears are back to normal and he's grinning from ear to ear!

Great news but not hard to see why the Kelly's guy did not want to do it , 2 1/2hrs extra work and they only get £25 for the whole job.

So £25 per appointment?

and i guess they want to get 1 per hr?

Doesn't even pay for the van, never mind the man.

Yep.

£25 per appointment yes.

Part of the problem is that OR engineers who subsequently go on the repair don't report the contractor for shoddy workmanship. So there's no downside to the contractor, also for the company everything looks like it's going well.

Part of the problem is that OR engineers who subsequently go on the repair don't report the contractor for shoddy workmanship. So there's no downside to the contractor, also for the company everything looks like it's going well.

The process to report these issues is not straightforward to use, and takes time, a commodity most engineers have precious little of.

The Openreach engineer who came yesterday said he was going to report him and that the Kelly's chap would have his fee taken back. Is £25 really all they get per visit? No expenses, eg fuel allowance? If that is all they get it seems grossly unfair and it is no wonder they won't do much more than fit an NT5E socket. I know he didn't do the job properly but am feeling quite sorry for him.

Edited by deleted (Thu 20-Aug-15 11:28:56)

How did Kelly's even get in to this position of doing fibre installs?

They seem like a very low budget business, some might even say 'cowboys', that have hit the jackpot. Easy cash if they just run through all the jobs.

When the guy came to my house, I could have done everything he did. All he did was unbox the HH5, plug it in to the ethernet cable that I had put in. He had his friend in the van supposedly go to the cabinet to check they had the right line. Within 5 minutes (the time it took the fibre connection to be made) he was off. Easy money.

So if he did say 9 jobs per hour (I'm allowing time for them to reach the destination house), thats 9 x £25 = £225 per hour! Lets say they work 6 hours a day, so thats £225 x 6 = £1350 per day off one "engineer"

The Kelly engineer's next appointment from us was 15 miles away and his appt before us was 35! None of his appointments seemed to be grouped in the same area so I doubt he could do as many as 9 in an hour. He took a bit less than 20 mins to do what work he did at our house. Marie.

Edited by deleted (Thu 20-Aug-15 13:06:59)

In reply to a post by whisper:

The Openreach engineer who came yesterday said he was going to report him and that the Kelly's chap would have his fee taken back. Is £25 really all they get per visit? No expenses, eg fuel allowance? If that is all they get it seems grossly unfair and it is no wonder they won't do much more than fit an NT5E socket. I know he didn't do the job properly but am feeling quite sorry for him.

It's some kind of tax fiddle too, and something the government should be cracking down on.

They are "self-employed" and they get £25. That's all they get, they've got to pay for their own fuel for the van. I'm not sure if they also then pay some kind of rental fee for the van to Kelly's. Then of course they need to pay all of their own tax and national insurance to HMRC.

Kelly's and others like them are precisely the firms who would be doing work for almost any provider rolling out infrastructure needing home installs.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

Part of the problem is that OR engineers who subsequently go on the repair don't report the contractor for shoddy workmanship. So there's no downside to the contractor, also for the company everything looks like it's going well.

The process to report these issues is not straightforward to use, and takes time, a commodity most engineers have precious little of.

Naturally the people that designed the process knew that and deliberately made it difficult to complain to weed out the trivial stuff without thinking about the more serious problems that don't get flagged up because of it.

In reply to a post by bowdon:

How did Kelly's even get in to this position of doing fibre installs?

Kellys lost the Virgin contract to Fujitsu five years ago, pretty much all of Virgin work is out to contract and subbed out to 'self employed' engineers.

So they prolly offered Openreach a good deal which Openreach could use to leverage the union on conditions for new Openreach starters properly employed .

Funnily enough Fujitsu lost the Virgin contract this year too. It's a race to the bottom in this part of the Telecom world.

Edited by deleted (Thu 20-Aug-15 21:53:59)

In reply to a post by whisper:

I know he didn't do the job properly but am feeling quite sorry for him.

But did he feel sorry for you at the time? You can see now what he should have left you with.

The only thing in his favour is that Kelly's shouldn't have sent an untrained guy on a broadband job. It sounds as though he's had at most half a day showing him how to do a basic install and test, and sent on his way. That is disgusting by Kelly's management.

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by whisper:

I know he didn't do the job properly but am feeling quite sorry for him.

But did he feel sorry for you at the time? You can see now what he should have left you with.

The only thing in his favour is that Kelly's shouldn't have sent an untrained guy on a broadband job. It sounds as though he's had at most half a day showing him how to do a basic install and test, and sent on his way. That is disgusting by Kelly's management.

No, I dare say he didn't feel sorry for me. I still can't get my head round the fact the 'engineer' only gets £25 per install! Has anyone had a proper fibre installation from Kelly's?

We see a few posters have done, so there will be many more. Bear in mind that 90% or more of the time it is:

- connect at the cabinet;
- fit VDSL2 filter plate to the existing NTE5 or replace a non-NTE5 master with one first;
- check with their equipment that the line passes the test;
- check the modem obtains sync.

You were in the other 10% or so, and most of those will just assume the engineer was right and they've been unlucky. That's if they even realise there is something wrong.

It's the same for Openreach engineers. The one that came to try and sort out a speed issue with my connection a while back had to travel 28 miles to get to me from his previous appointment and his next was 42 miles away.

In reply to a post by whisper:

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

In reply to a post by whisper:

I know he didn't do the job properly but am feeling quite sorry for him.

But did he feel sorry for you at the time? You can see now what he should have left you with.

The only thing in his favour is that Kelly's shouldn't have sent an untrained guy on a broadband job. It sounds as though he's had at most half a day showing him how to do a basic install and test, and sent on his way. That is disgusting by Kelly's management.

No, I dare say he didn't feel sorry for me. I still can't get my head round the fact the 'engineer' only gets £25 per install! Has anyone had a proper fibre installation from Kelly's?

YES. Due to a lack of civil works [an additional pole was required] not being ready it was a neigh on impossible job to install the service. However he said he could see a solution, called the boss to get clearance to proceed [and get paid more] and then cracked on. Did such an excellent job I gave him top marks on his phone's survey.

I see. Well I am very glad we had the Openreach Engineer out to fix it. He asked me if I would fill out a questionnaire regarding his work which I was more than happy to do.

Still downloading at 16Mbps+ so the line appears to be stable at the moment. Don't think we have had a re-sync yet, well not according to the router or BT Wholesale's speed test, same sync figure shows. Am pretty rural here surrounded by fields and overhead cables both electricity and phone. The pole is in next door's garden by the side of our drive.

Found the cabinet right next to the exchange and it appears to be a Huawei one by the shape, size and number of grills according to the description and photo on Kitz site. Was given an ECI modem, would've thought that it would have been better to have been supplied with a Huawei modem to match the cab's, but I remember the Kelly's chap saying that was all he had on his van. Perhaps it doesn't really matter then.

Think I was probably one of the first to have FTTC installed as the cabinet was enabled several weeks ago. Will just keep fingers crossed that sync speed does not plummet because of cross talk!

In reply to a post by simon194:

It's the same for Openreach engineers. The one that came to try and sort out a speed issue with my connection a while back had to travel 28 miles to get to me from his previous appointment and his next was 42 miles away.

Nope, that's unusual. Most OR engineers stay very local

Only ECI modems are available to engineers at the moment.

Any particular reason?

In reply to a post by Icaras:

Only ECI modems are available to engineers at the moment.

In reply to a post by whisper:

Any particular reason?

In reply to a post by Icaras:

Only ECI modems are available to engineers at the moment.

I imagine it's because they think they can't be hacked.

I've got some good news...

Not sure but

from the 3 different fttc "installs" they have all been from Glasgow they mentioned that they also are staying in BnBs/hotels

i stay in aberdeen.

Sounds like they're "on loan" from other areas of the UK. Possibly why they're having to travel more

Something has occurred to me. Wasn't sure whether to do a new post but decided to add it here. When the OR engineer came to do the install properly, would he have reset the DLM (at least I think that is what it is called) because of the increased speeds after his installation, or would it have been left alone? He did mumble something about resetting something but I got distracted by my neighbour knocking at the door.