Not worth referring refer performance problem to ofcom/cisas

I have been advised by my ISP that it is not worth referring a performance related problem to ofcom/cisas as the ISP has a 'deadlock' with BTW. While I could ask for compensation nothing will be done that could improve performance due to the deadlock situation.

It seems a bit strange as surely the ombudsman type services are in place to mediate in such matters and if the ISP's suppliers are not included in any arbitration process there is little point in them pursuing issues on behalf of consumers.

Can anyone confirm that this is the case?

Specifics of the case will be needed, but as your contract is with the retailer not the wholesaler then if the retailer cannot meet the contracted speeds/conditions and wholesaler refuses to play then the usual remedy is to let you leave.

Andrew, many thanks for the response.

So, given that my contract is with the ISP and not their suppliers, all the ombudsman can do is to require the ISP to take specified action, but if the ISP's suppliers decide not to cooperate, the ombudsman can only suggest that the consumer leaves?

I imagine that, as BTW/OR have a near monopoly on the delivery side, there is little an ISP can do to persuade them to collaborate in providing a reasonable service, so if the ombudsman is not able to intervene further the customer will inevitably lose out.

That does not sound too encouraging.

A lot depends on the actual problem, a great many problems are resolved once the right people in an ISP or the wholesaler finally get to hear about the issue and solve it quickly.

BT Wholesale only has a monopoly in around 4% of UK households.

Without knowing the issue its impossible to say either

1. Save the hassle and switch providers
2. Pursue it further

ISP live to avoid ADR because it costs them money even if they do win.

One thing you have to consider is that BTW (or anyone else) are not required to provide you with a broadband service of any type. Therefore if it is not economical for them to provide the quality/speed of service you want then they are within their rights to refuse to supply - and no-one has the powers to make them.

All BTW have to do is provide you with a voice line capable of supporting dial up modem capabilities.

Or to be even blunter

What does your contract say your committed bit rate for the service is?

99.9% chance it is not mentioned, as consumer broadband services are so cheap they cannot afford to guarantee speeds.

Andrew , you suggested that a summary of the issue may be useful. I have kept it as succinct as possible.

When my FTTC connection was enabled last year the download speed was 68% lower than the estimate. I raised this as a fault with my ISP who in turn raised it with BTW/OR.

Following a series of visits by OR engineers probable causes for the low performance were suggested and then dropped (eg REIN, aluminium wiring) before it was established that a line length of 1400 metres from the cabinet was the prime reason. The engineers suggested that a speed of 15-20 Mbps was probably the limit.

It was suggested that the condition of the local wiring was suspect and various engineers tested, remade joints and swapped pairs. This resulted at first in a further decrease in upload speed to 7.5 Mbps and then a welcome increase to 16 Mbps.

I was happy with the 16 Mbps but an attempt was then made on 20 November to improve my upload speed which had been around 0.5 Mbps since connection. This resulted in a drop in down speed to 12 Mbps (and no improvement in upload speed) where it has remained for the past 3 months.

I have endeavored to get my ISP to arrange for the adjustments made on the 20 November to be reversed but it would appear that there are no records of any adjustments having been made.

I have been reasonably happy with my ISP for the past 10 years, however, the support service has been unable to cope with the level of demand during the past six months, as indicated by numerous posts on their forum. This initially lead to me dealing with 12 different people with no progress. When the fault was eventually passed to the complaints team it rapidly became clear that the poor chap handling my case was absolutely swamped and was unable to give it the necessary level of commitment. When it became evident that the issue needed to be escalated it became evident that the ISP's senior management were unwilling to have anything to do with customers or their problems.

Communications between the ISP, BTW and OR have been abysmal. The ISP has repeatedly had to struggle to find someone willing to carry out tasks and then it has often been necessary to repeat the requests several times to obtain any action. Communications are particularly bad within OR as the engineers apparently now rarely keep notes of their actions. This resulted in each visiting engineer having to waste hours duplicating the tests carried out during previous visits. I started to ask the engineers to give me a summary of their work and kept my own notes to pass on to the next engineer which did seem to be quite useful.

Yesterday an engineer visited and following some lengthy checks discovered that changing ports at the cabinet resulted in significantly higher output and he asked for the necessary remote switching to be carried out. This was refused as BTW had apparently decided that no further work was to be carried out on my line.

My ISP have now emailed me to say that nothing more would be done and suggested that either I change to another ISP or refer the matter to CISAS.

Change ISP.

Andrew

Whilst I originally attempted to seek an improvement in the large disparity between the estimated and delivered performance I soon realised that 30 Mbps was completely out of the question due to line length and was happy with the 16 Mbps that was delivered for five weeks until the 20 November.

It is a return to this performance I have been looking for. I have completely given up on an improvement on the 0.5 Mbps upload speed.

I understand that the 16 Mbps is not contractually enforceable. All I have said is that as they were able to deliver 16 Mbps for five weeks it is not unreasonable to ask for it to be delivered now.

If the line distance is really 1400 metres, then yes downstream of 15-20 Mbps is to be expected.
Upstream speed wise something around 4 to 6 Mbps.

Local conditions could easily mean it is less and there be little that Openreach can do, apart from running thicker copper cable to the property.

Changing ISP is not likely to improve the line, since it will still be the same line to the cabinet. So question then is what do you hope as a positive outcome from the ADR?

Annoying, but not sure what else can be done, ISP seems to have arranged engineer visits, but if the line length is what they say, then you are getting reasonable speeds.

So unless the ISP sold the connection on a guaranteed speed that was higher, then there is no comeback.

And this is where factors like take-up on the cabinet, which can increase cross talk can be a factor i.e. as you may have been swapped around the cable bundle in an attempt to find a pair that tests better, it may have the effect of being closed to other VDSL2 users and thus more cross talk.

If it was me, I'd have sourced an unlocked VDSL2 modem to peek at the stats so that can track whats happening, rather than just rely on chain from Openreach to ISP.

It is not impossible that you had the best pair, but a swap to improve things did not work out, but someone else is now on your old pair.

It would not surprise me if your ISP simply decides to provide you a MAC and wish you all the best for the future.

If it was me I'd have a 2nd line installed then cancel the 1st. This would obviously force a port swap.

Andrew,

The line length according to OR is 1418 metres.

30 Mbps is available at the junction box at the opposite side of the road, a distance of 7.5 metres from the box outside my property but I do understand that OR will not carry out such work as a matter of principle.

Is 12 Mbps down and 0.5 Mbps up really reasonable for a line of 1400 metres which is apparently free of aluminium?

As far as OR are concerned a stumbling block is that they deny that any adjustments took place on 20 November when my contemporaneous notes show that the engineer in question told me that he had carried out work at the cabinet and remotely with the 'centre of excellence' in York. I have since been advised that OR engineers, as a rule, no longer keep notes of the work undertaken on-site.

As to 'what do you hope as a positive outcome from the ADR' - ideally pressure brought to bear on the ISP to encourage their suppliers to revisit the 16 Mbps especially as yesterday's engineer said that he was able to get increased performance at the cabinet.

BatBoy,

I understood that the most ISP's suppliers are very likely to be the same, if this is so would changing ISP achieve anything as far as performance is concerned?

It sounds like your ISP (who?) has given up trying to get BT to do anything. A change to a better ISP should do the trick.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband....

Download is in the ballpark, but upload is not.

I am a bit sceptical of the 30 Mbps available at a box that is just 7.5m shorter.

To be frank I believe you've gone further than you would with the majority of providers already. Openreach is within its rights to refuse the work, so long as reasonable efforts have been made to provide a service.

Reasonable efforts and best efforts are lovely phrases where the lawyers will make their money and you will go insane with probably little improvement.

I would be very wary of saying SHOULD, may would be a better choice of word.

The key really is independent analysis of the VDSL2 statistics from an unlocked modem, and information from immediate neighbours on what speeds they manage.

Andrew

The 30 Mbps has been measured on three separate occasions at the junction box on the other side of the road to the property. It is just under 1000 metres from the cabinet. The cable then runs a further 400 metres from this point around the periphery of the close until it ends up at a junction box immediately outside my place. This box is 7.5 metres (centre to centre) across the road from the one where the 30 Mbps has been verified as available. Three engineers have said that to run conduit and cable the 7.5 metres under the road would be the obvious solution and would have saved very many hours of work by them, but I do understand that is against OR policy to undertake such work.

I think that the only reason that I have got as far as I have is that I have politely pursued this and when told nothing could be done asked for the reasons. Unfortunately my recent questioning of the discrepancies between BT's answers and my notes of what actually happened do appear to have ruffled some feathers and I haven't even mentioned, as yet, the time when an engineer turned up here one Friday afternoon clearly so 'tired and emotional' that he was unable to carry out the work he was tasked with

I have an unlocked HG612 on its way.

That 400m explains the loss of speed. I am 200m from my cabinet but 600m via cabling route - that is just the way the network was designed as when it went in distances were largely irrelevant - it is literally cheaper to go round the houses than to cable direct.

The cost to put in that 7.5m of cable will depend on the environment. It could mean closing the road, digging a large trench, avoiding gas/water mains, issues with natural ground conditions, etc. Or it could just be a mole driven under the ground taking half an hour.

BT are under no obligation to do any of this work. You may be able to get them to do it if you offer to pay their costs - but it could be very expensive. The ISP can do nothing to change that (at least not economically, better to lose a customer than to spend thousands that would never be recouped).

Ian, I agree with everything you have said. It was OR engineers who said that it would be less expensive to run 7.5 metres of cable under the road than to check and remake many joints around the close. I do understand that it is against OR policy to carry out such work. When first told that it was a matter of cost I did say that as OR have a published table of costs covering work of this nature could I, if I wished, pay for the work, the story immediately changed to 'we don't do this sort of thing as it would be creating a precedent'.

When this was made clear to me I immediately gave up on the idea of achieving anything like the estimated speed and concentrated on trying to return to the stable 16 Mbps that I was getting for 5 weeks last year. Unfortunately, as indicated above, BT are saying that this is not possible as they do not believe that any adjustments were made on 20 November that resulted in the immediate drop in performance. This does not agree with my contemporaneous note of the engineer's conversation with me, so I really do doubt the effectiveness of their record keeping.

Urm they do do network rearrangement but you need to basically flash the cash, rather than appear as the next in a long line of people who think £8/m buys them a dedicated engineering team.

The 400m was not clear and now makes it totally clear as to why your speeds are as they are.

Copper networks are such that their previous work to try different pairs may have disturbed things such that the one slightly working pair is not down to the performance you have now.

BT can legally tell you to go away and quote USO of 28 kilo bits per second.

Now if digging that 7.5m of new cable benefits 400 customers by taking speeds from say 5 Mbps to 50 Mbps, they may be a commercial case to be made.

That is the harsh reality, the rest is now just a case of trying to highlight your case and maybe get someone to pay attention, but in a world where others are still on 0.5 Mbps you are far from the bottom of the list.

Andrew

I did indicate to the engineers that I had looked at their table of charges and was aware of the potential costs so they would not have been under the impression that I thought that '£8/m buys ... a dedicated engineering team'.

I think that I explained in my earlier summary of the problem that 'it was established that a line length of 1400 metres from the cabinet was the prime reason. The engineers suggested that a speed of 15-20 Mbps was probably the limit. Your response was 'If the line distance is really 1400 metres, then yes downstream of 15-20 Mbps is to be expected. Upstream speed wise something around 4 to 6 Mbps.'

I do appreciate that copper networks are fragile entities and that one piece of work may undo the benefits of previous work. Given this surely it is incumbent on OR to keep records of the work undertaken so that if a problem occurs immediately following some adjustments, the necessary remedial action can be taken without delay? I suggest that is common sense and would save OR countless wasted hours of engineer's time. I understand that OR engineers used to keep notes on each call-out and that these would be forwarded to the ISP on request, but that this is no longer the case.

As far as benefitting 400 customers is concerned, the number would be no more than 20 so I do appreciate that this not particularly helpful to my case.

Referral to Ofcom/CISAS is a method of highlighting the shortfalls in service standards by all concerned and hopefully raising the profile of my case.