Openreach seem to have broken my phone line

Hi,

BT Openreach were doing work a couple of doors up from me. I lost my dial tone and my ADSL2+ sync rate halved (which I believe means that one leg of the line has been disconnected).

I approached the Opeanreach employee at the other house. He denied having anything to do with it, giving me some drivel about that house not having anyting to do with mine, but then admitted he had been in the telephone cabinet (!!) Anyway he refused to fix the problem or even admit that he might have caused it.

Now I took down his employee ID and name and made a complaint to Opeanreach, and also reported a line fault online to BT retail. After reporting the line fault online it said that they needed more time to check the line (or something like that).

Any other advice (either about getting the line fixed quickly or making a complaint)?

Cheers

[edit]
The fault reporter came back with this:
https://www.bt.com/static/wa/consumerfaulttracking/e...

Edited by deleted (Sun 15-Jul-12 13:26:09)

Making a complaint, best way is to by pass the monkey's that represent BT customer support (Indian call center) that is not fit for purpose , even some of the English side is no better cut them out by complaining to the CEO of BT , you will normally receive a swift reply (they even work on a Sunday) they will liaise with open reach. to find out what has gone on,
most likely they will arrange an engineers visit , and if this lack of dial tone issue is still present then there should be a 0% chance of any charges being raised on you account, Note i said should be a 0% , but this is BT we are talking about here, with all their cheap/free broadband offers they have to re-coop some of that money somehow

BTW the fault report link indicates that the fault is somewhere on the D'SIDE pair that's the leg from the PCP to your master socket basically

Edited by tommy45 (Sun 15-Jul-12 13:38:11)

In reply to a post by humm:

I approached the Opeanreach employee at the other house. He denied having anything to do with it, giving me some drivel about that house not having anyting to do with mine, but then admitted he had been in the telephone cabinet (!!) Anyway he refused to fix the problem or even admit that he might have caused it.

Now I took down his employee ID and name and made a complaint to Opeanreach, and also reported a line fault online to BT retail. After reporting the line fault online it said that they needed more time to check the line (or something like that).

Even if you are correct about the cause of the problem, all you have is circumstantial evidence. You have no proof...

The unfortunate Openreach engineer has mates (you clearly didn't consider that fact).

Do NOT expect a quick resolution to the problem if his mates hear about your complaint.

In reply to a post by humm:

Any other advice (either about getting the line fixed quickly or making a complaint)?

Retract or modify your complaint.
You appear to have made it a personal attack on an Openreach employee with nothing more than circumstantial evidence.

Report the problem concisely, which (looking at your edit) you appear to have done.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Do NOT expect a quick resolution to the problem if his mates hear about your complaint.

They'll do as they're told or it'll be grounds for further/escalated complaint. This is not a Union matter!

OP has grounds for complaint and reasonable hypothesis of probable cause. When a working thing stops working when something has changed, then it is likely the change is the cause.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

In reply to a post by humm:

I approached the Opeanreach employee at the other house. He denied having anything to do with it, giving me some drivel about that house not having anyting to do with mine, but then admitted he had been in the telephone cabinet (!!) Anyway he refused to fix the problem or even admit that he might have caused it.

Now I took down his employee ID and name and made a complaint to Opeanreach, and also reported a line fault online to BT retail. After reporting the line fault online it said that they needed more time to check the line (or something like that).

Even if you are correct about the cause of the problem, all you have is circumstantial evidence. You have no proof...

The unfortunate Openreach engineer has mates (you clearly didn't consider that fact).

Do NOT expect a quick resolution to the problem if his mates hear about your complaint.

In reply to a post by humm:

Any other advice (either about getting the line fixed quickly or making a complaint)?

Retract or modify your complaint.
You appear to have made it a personal attack on an Openreach employee with nothing more than circumstantial evidence.

Report the problem concisely, which (looking at your edit) you appear to have done.

No doubt he will have mates , but if requested by the high level complaints to their bosses to get this resolved i very much doubt that they will want it drawing out longer than needed, this sort of problem happens a lot about time openreach did something to prevent

Hi,

Complaint to Openreach and fault report to BT retail where done separately.

Yes it is circumstantial, but fairly strong circumstantial evidence... Given that he admitting to doing something inside the cabinet, I am quite sure he was talking nonsense (he said something like this line is here, it's not connected to your line, and pointed..). I don't mean to contradict myself, but I actually didn't flat out ask him to fix the problem.

I'm not looking for the complaint to Openreach to fix the problem, but just really investigate what happened and take actions to ensure it doesn't happen again. As you say the evidence is circumstantial, but it's still Openreach's responsibility to investigate.

Anyway, your comments about mates, did you mean that it could have been a colleague that caused the problem, or simply that the complaint will be ignored if his mates hear about it..

Cheers

Post deleted by aquilla

cut them out by complaining to the CEO of BT

OK, let's have a little focus here. The OP's line has developed a fault, (the nature of which we are unsure,) yes, there was an Openreach engineer working in the vacinity at the time the OP noticed the fault, the engineer said that he wasn't the cause, and as a result you are now advising that OP go straight to the CEO's office ......... ???


Do you remember the story of the little boy who cried wolf ?

Aye, all a bit OTT. OP you need to consider that if the engineer went chasing your fault and it turned out to be non-openreach related i.e your equipment or an exchange line card it would affect his performance and also put him at odds with regulatory compliance (basically he can't decide to go fix anyone phone line without a valid fault report otherwise ofcom and other service providers don't like it and he could face a discipliary or no insurace payout of he gets hurt working on other peoples phone lines).

Further he wasn't wrong when he said the lines are not connected, they share common cables and your termination may have become disconnected due to a faulty connector at the cabinate but when you see how old some of those connectors are you probably wouldn't be so scathing.

Lastly yes coincidence does happen, last month I had a similar issue when I was installing a line at a business premises and the dial tone & broadband suddenly went down on another line, a lot of accusations from the customer and a few tests revealed it was a fault back at the exchange no where near where I had been working, talked to some other engineers that had worked there the day before and exactly the same thing happened to them - customer failed to mention that! wasted half an hour of my time.

Edited by deleted (Sun 15-Jul-12 15:48:16)

In reply to a post by Zarjaz:

cut them out by complaining to the CEO of BT

OK, let's have a little focus here. The OP's line has developed a fault, (the nature of which we are unsure,) yes, there was an Openreach engineer working in the vacinity at the time the OP noticed the fault, the engineer said that he wasn't the cause, and as a result you are now advising that OP go straight to the CEO's office ......... ???


Do you remember the story of the little boy who cried wolf ?

In reply to a post by humm:

Any other advice (either about getting the line fixed quickly or making a complaint)?
The fault reporter came back with this:
https://www.bt.com/static/wa/consumerfaulttracking/e...

Was the question the op asked , i gave my answer, as the general BT Retail support (outsourced ,sometimes hard to understand overseas call center ) that they call support is not fit for purpose, so how do you get anything sorted out in bt? go to the top, is the way i have done it in the past ,worked for me, and when the op reported a voice fault why wasn't they given a date & time of an engineers visit then or as soon as possible afterwards ?

Thanks for your response.

In the best case, all I would expect is that he went back to check the work he had done (and nothing more). If he had done something to cause it, then there'd certainly be nothing preventing him from undoing it. Even if he had said something like "It might have become disconnected when I was working inside the cabinet, but I'm not allowed to go back so you need to report a line fault to BT" then I would be a lot more understanding.

Regarding lines not being connected (and he was gesturing at the two houses) - the point was that I don't see it as relevant as he had done work inside the cabinet (the nature of which I don't know) (this was revealed afterwards). Basically he wasn't interested that he might have caused a problem with my line - even if he wasn't allowed to fix it, I'd still expect him to want to know. As it was he said it was nothing to do with him, even though he knew he had been working inside the cabinet. Also I had no idea what he was going to say when I went over to the other house, for all I knew he may have said "there is a localised fault I'm working on", or "I'm doing some work and it should be fixed soon".

Cheers

and when the op reported a voice fault why wasn't they given a date & time of an engineers visit then or as soon as possible afterwards ?

At a guess, that would be because the fault has been categorised as either LN or CE, so only a 'required by' fault. No appointment required.

Well, I can share a bit more of my experience in getting the fault fixed.

I had reported it online around half 12, and I just called BT and the adviser informed me that he could see it had been logged online, but it hadn't actually been raised with Openreach. He raised it with Openreach there and then and informed me that it will be fixed by 5pm on Thursday He had run another line test and said the fault was in BT's network and between the telegraph pole and the cabinet (which contradicts what the online test said).

So the conclusion so far is that if you raise a fault online and don't hear anything shortly afterwards, it's probably worth following it up with a call to BT.

Cheers

In reply to a post by humm:

Well, I can share a bit more of my experience in getting the fault fixed.

I had reported it online around half 12, and I just called BT and the adviser informed me that he could see it had been logged online, but it hadn't actually been raised with Openreach. He raised it with Openreach there and then and informed me that it will be fixed by 5pm on Thursday He had run another line test and said the fault was in BT's network and between the telegraph pole and the cabinet (which contradicts what the online test said).

So the conclusion so far is that if you raise a fault online and don't hear anything shortly afterwards, it's probably worth following it up with a call to BT.

Cheers

cool, keep us posted.

About going back to check his work, depending on the type of cab (some being a rats nest of wires) all he might have been able to do was look at the wires he was working on, even if he went back there how would he know which wire was yours there are literally hundreds some times thousands of wires in a cabinate... the conductor may have corroded and broken inside the wire insulation in which case it would be impossible to spot without access to the records to do with your line which he won't be given access to without a valid job.

He could have entered your home, attached a tone and listened for it down at the cab with his amp but then he's breaking a whole bunch of ofcom & H&S regulations and will get little thanks for it. That's just the way it is now, back when we were 'BT' we could take ownership of Mrs Jones and Mr Smiths random problems - in fact it was encouraged but now its just not the case.

As for him being disintrested - dunno what to tell you, probably hates his job, liked the way it all used to be dosn't like the changes. Maybe he's working on contractual overtime which he had no choice in doing or hates life.

Edited by deleted (Sun 15-Jul-12 18:43:28)

About going back to check his work, depending on the type of cab (some being a rats nest of wires) all he might have been able to do was look at the wires he was working on, even if he went back there how would he know which wire was yours there are literally hundreds some times thousands of wires in a cabinet... the conductor may have corroded and broken inside the wire insulation in which case it would be impossible to spot without access to the records to do with your line which he won't be given access to without a valid job.

He could have entered your home, attached a tone and listened for it down at the cab with his amp but then he's breaking a whole bunch of ofcom & H&S regulations and will get little thanks for it. That's just the way it is now, back when we were 'BT' we could take ownership of Mrs Jones and Mr Smiths random problems - in fact it was encouraged but now its just not the case.

Yep .... Very succinctly put.

As for him being disintrested - dunno what to tell you, probably hates his job, liked the way it all used to be dosn't like the changes. Maybe he's working on contractual overtime which he had no choice in doing or hates life.

Maybe was unhappy with the way the OP spoke to him/her ? Judging by the tone of the original post, he might have been brusque, at best.........

Thanks for your input again.

Based on what you say, I guess him going back to the cab to check he hadn't caused my problem was never likely then. I didn't really think he would to be honest, I was just hoping for a decent answer.

Will keep you posted on the resolution of the fault. Hopefully I'll be able to get out of BT where the actual fault was.

Edited by deleted (Sun 15-Jul-12 19:28:40)

In reply to a post by tommy45:

Was the question the op asked , i gave my answer, as the general BT Retail support (outsourced ,sometimes hard to understand overseas call center ) that they call support is not fit for purpose, so how do you get anything sorted out in bt? go to the top, is the way i have done it in the past ,worked for me, and when the op reported a voice fault why wasn't they given a date & time of an engineers visit then or as soon as possible afterwards ?

If large numbers of people start going to the CEO's office on the first day of having reported a fault then the most likely result is termination of that avenue to the general public. There's plenty of easy ways for that termination to happen, even without changing the email address.

The CEO's office of no large company is going to act as first-line support .

You may get away with it, but for heaven's sake stop suggesting it to others. All you will do is kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

The CEO's office must only be used as the resource of last resort, when all else is failing.

The BT CEO office always responds. I am still awaiting a reply from the CEO of TalkTalk from a letter I sent in 2009.

I would be very surprised if an Openreach tech responded to a fault report at the side of the road these days. They have a stopwatch and tracker monitoring their every step. There simply is no time to do the job they are issued and micro managed on let alone deal with roadside reports.

Edited by deleted (Sun 15-Jul-12 20:13:59)

They should start offering proper support then !!!! i will only engage with them as a last resort, as they are at best useless , i know i have had the unfortunate pleasure of having to contact them on more than one occasion, but for some thing's the high level complaints team via the CEO route is the only way to get a resolution , that isn't the customers fault but their's As said if you get no joy with the normal support channels then take it higher up the chain or end up being screwed over that is your bt for you
And those at the top know only too well how bad there overseas support is , if they don't want to be answering complaints then they should sort out that shambles

You completely miss my point. Did you even read my post properly? If so, you didn't understand it.