The problem was (oh, how we laughed) that the Openreach engineers could not run the Openreach diagnostics as instructed by 2nd line support. They could only get Java security errors. Though they spent the whole afternoon trying (top marks for tenacity, I guess).

Then when the engineer reported back, it went down as a fail, so Openreach would send another engineer, who would encounter exactly the same problem and again waste an afternoon of his and my time.

3rd time around, the engineer didn't attend the premises because he knew perfectly well what would happen. (This annoyed my provider.)

Then when my provider escalated, Openreach proposed a 4th engineer visit. Without having resolved the Java security issue!

My provider, to their credit, put their foot down and insisted on the fault being transferred to the Complex Fault Team, who resolved it almost immediately.

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

I personally feel like there is a culture of ‘blame’ .... everyone wants it to be someone else’s issue ...... if Joe Engineer is sent out it ‘looks’ like the CP has done something.. it seems not to bother anyone that in such instances there is sod all the engineer can do.

Hasn't it always been that way even before broadband came along?

I dread to think how many times over my BT career I was given the details of a fault by my FDO and I've immediately said whats the point of me going to that customers premises as that fault is clearly in the exchange or on a PW or even on the customers own equipment. I use to moan all the time to the guys on 154 who at that point use to sit in our local exchanges but they never listened and kept passing them over to us because it became our problem to get the right people to deal with it.