In their management philosophy and instructions to staff it is more profitable to gain another or retain two others in a tenth of the time it takes to sort out a real problem like yours.

I get that, which is why I will create as much grief as possible, and take it all the way to arbirtration, possibly involving my welsh assembly member whose researcher has offered any help he can.

Openreach don't appear to be much better.. My local BDUK project have finally managed to get them to confirm there is an error on the data they hold for me, but they don't know what is causing it.

I'm now starting month 4 since my cabinet went live, pretty much ready to give up on the whole thing.

The issue is now resolved: it was bad data for my line on the BT Wholesale system. This was exactly what me and my techie friend thought all along.
BT Residential complaint handlersl were 100% useless. They spun it out the full 56 days without lifting a finger other thant to trot out stock answers. I have taken them to the Ombudsman to try and get some kind of compensation or even some free months of FTTC broadband.
How did get it fixed? The Welsh Government Superfast Cymru team sent an email to BT Openreach to check the data on my behalf, which of course is what BT Residential should have done back in May. I am very grateful to them.
I will update the thread on whether Ombudsman Services get me an offer from BT.
I will also update on speed once I get hooked up to VDSL. Hoping for around 12M, for 1500m line.

Glad yours is sorted.

I've given up. Openreach haven't responded to my enquires for over a month, my local BDUK scheme (Fastershire) haven't responded to my last 3 emails. MrSaffron didn't appear to get anywhere when I initially contacted him at the start of all this, so it seems all my options have been used up.

It's already been confirmed by Fastershire there is bad data for my line. How complicated can it be to sort out? Coming up on 6 months chasing this.

Did you go the full nine yards and escalate the BT complaint to the Ombudsman Service? One suggestion I had from my techie friend was to transfer the line contract to another company who could do the chasing for you. There is bound to be a bit of cost involved, and you would lose 1571 and the other BT titbits for a while but you could transfer back in to BT later. If you are interested I will send a private communication with the name of a small line provider company who could do this.

Thanks for the offer, but I'm already currently switching over to Uno's Talk Surf package as I wanted to get their fibre package bundle when it eventually launches. I contacted Uno yesterday (who replied very promptly to my query), and Matt said they can push Openreach to get it resolved if I still cannot order fibre once that service is launched. Obviously no ETA on that but I've waited this long anyway. So we'll see how that goes.

It's nice to have some positive sounding advice from a company I'm not even a customer of yet. Talk about customer service done right.

Edited by deleted (Tue 23-Aug-16 16:43:40)

Guess what? The optimism expressed earlier in the thread that I could get FTTC was dashed. The VDSL availability immediately disappeared from BT Wholesale so I was unable to order it from any ISP.

I raised another case with BT back in August as my ADSL download speed had dropped to about 0.2MB/s. They finally got hold of the local Openreach fault expert, based in Aberystwyth who fixed a couple of bad connections and I got a stable 2.8MB/s with 0.5MB/s upload.
But wait for it...
Magically my line was then marked as VDSL available. I chose Plusnet as they have a cheaper all-day calls and "fibre" package. I get, not the promised 4M, not the ~10M I expected, but a respectable 22.5MB/s. So I do wonder if my line is shorter than the 2200m BT were insisting all along.
I also wonder why I had to go through all that pain with useless BT support, useless ombudsman, useless Welsh government "Superfast Cymru" to finally end up at the right place.
My download speed on the PC is limited to about 10MB/s by a slightly flakey home mains network so I will post a button when I have sorted that out.

Edited by deleted (Tue 12-Dec-17 11:40:57)

Is that your line length to the cabinet?

My house is 1500m from the cabinet by road. BT after insisting over a long wrangle that it was "too far" for VDSL, after much badgering stated that it was 2200m implying a very roundabout route. 22.5MB/s would be very very good for 2200m is my understanding, so I think it is probably nearer the 1500m which I estimated in the first place. Techie question: do Openreach engineers not have use of a reflectometer which would tell you the length to a few cm?.