In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Depends on the contract that exists between your comms provider and Openreach. These are negotiable, if your comms provider does not value you enough to suggest SLA arrangements, compensation then perhaps change comms provider, or pay enough to get the personal treatment.

Baiting BT firms is all fun and games, but it achieves nothing constructive.

Why should you have to do that, its law for the electricity firms to pay up if they miss an appointment or you are without power for over 24 (i think) hours. Electricity firms were your example and its clear for them the rules are indeed tougher.

Getting BT to pay up for a missed appointment let alone messing up your braodband for over a day is like trying to get blood out of a stone by hitting it with a wet sponge.

if you are a large business which has hundreds free each year to spend

oooh, not hundreds a year to spend. I am in awe of your view of a large business.

You can't have it both ways, either a) you're a small business running on the cheap on a residential broadband connection with no backup, no SLA etc or b) you're a substantial business with a lot to lose.

If you're so small and cheapskate to do a) then you aren't losing a whole lot of anything if it goes wrong. If you're b) acting like a) then you've made your bed so lay in it.

In reply to a post by yarwell:

LOL, not even an Openreach issue if its the DSLAM.

Who is responsible for BT owned equipment in BT exchanges, green boxes etc then?

Maybe im wrong on this but when the OP said line card i assumed that is BT equipment, which is serviced by Openreach.

I may be missing something though, BT have so many departments to make the game pass the buck more fun.

In reply to a post by yarwell:

if you are a large business which has hundreds free each year to spend

oooh, not hundreds a year to spend. I am in awe of your view of a large business.

No you are just in awe of not comprehending small business doesnt have money to waste.

In reply to a post by yarwell:

You can't have it both ways, either a) you're a small business running on the cheap on a residential broadband connection with no backup, no SLA etc or b) you're a substantial business with a lot to lose.

No idea what you are talking about, My business subs to a business service from an ISP.... Wouldnt make a blind bit of difference if it was a residential or a business package for the problem that occured though...... Part at exchange dead, no new bit available.

In reply to a post by yarwell:

If you're so small and cheapskate to do a) then you aren't losing a whole lot of anything if it goes wrong. If you're b) acting like a) then you've made your bed so lay in it.

Its not about being cheap, its about wasting money, you have never ran a business have you?

Openreach do not do DSL, with the exception of the VDSL cabinets, they do the copper lines. All exchange DSL switches, DSLAMs / MSANs, 21CN kit, etc, are all serviced by BT Wholesale.

Openreach, again apart from VDSL, don't do active anything. They service copper and fibre, they hand off the copper to other operators to terminate on DSLAMs and voice kit and the fibre they terminate and hand over to customers.

If you want to complain about the various departments Ofcom are your people - the reason there are so many is due to requirements for equivalence of access into Openreach.

In reply to a post by CARPETBURN:

Id also love to know a backup plan for when im working at home and my ADSL goes down for a reason beyond my control and my ISPs........ Im all ears on that also.

In my case said backup consists of Virgin Media's cable service.

Even if that were to go wrong at the same time as my DSL I can tether my 3G phone.

Another option is to order ADSL on two lines either from two different LLU operators or an LLU operator and BT Wholesale.

Edited by deleted (Sat 20-Mar-10 13:42:14)

in reality SLA's usually dont garuantuee anything other than financial compensation when it goes wrong. Even then it tends to be underwhelming.

is there such thing as 3G payg? so only pay when use it no monthly fees.

could be handy especially as my router supports 3g as auto fallback if the adsl goes down.

In reply to a post by Pgre:

You hate BT that much ? eeeek.

Yes, I do. And if you had your business and life disrupted by a problem which took 5 months to resolve, with about 30 engineer visits, and which was only resolved in the end by switching to an LLU connection, you would be bitter too. In the end, BT walked away from the problem, because they didn't have a clue what was causing it. I was so angry that I switched from BT Wholesale to a LLU product, and suddenly the problem was no longer there. During those 5 months I was told a pack of lies by BTO employees at every level in the business, right up to management.

In reply to a post by Pgre:

Can we ask who you work for ... ? I am sure most companies could be classed as jokes but I am guessing if it wasn't for BT you wouldn't have an ADSL connection today.
You could say you don't have a choice.. but can you blame BT for that ?

I work for my own limited company, which you would not have heard of, because it is very small. Most companies can't be classed as jokes, because they are nowhere near as bad as BT.

I know of very few other companies where......

Staff are so poorly trained
Communication between divisions is so poor
Record keeping is so lax
There is such a drive to screw the last penny from the customer
There is such a lack of reinvestment in plant

Did you not see the programmes on TV where BT charged customers to fix faults on its own wiring ? The engineer that attended my neighbour's property yesterday would not have been wanting to mess about with cabling that had only just been installed 3 months before, if there was some sort of record-keeping system in place.

Edited by deleted (Sat 20-Mar-10 14:25:38)

In reply to a post by yarwell:

if you are a large business which has hundreds free each year to spend

oooh, not hundreds a year to spend. I am in awe of your view of a large business.

You can't have it both ways, either a) you're a small business running on the cheap on a residential broadband connection with no backup, no SLA etc or b) you're a substantial business with a lot to lose.

If you're so small and cheapskate to do a) then you aren't losing a whole lot of anything if it goes wrong. If you're b) acting like a) then you've made your bed so lay in it.

It's small businesses that are going to get this country out of the recession, so that sort of attitude is not very helpful to anyone.