Should Openreach employ more women?

In April an all in one cabinet was installed in our village. In June the fibre was connected, the telephone lines transferred from the old cabinet and we were told that orders for superfast would be taken from the end of July.

We have now been told that it will be at least the end of September and probably several weeks after that because Openreach have to agree a protocol with the ISPs on how to transfer over the few premises that have a VDSL service from the old cabinet. This was something that I would have thought would have been addressed at the planning stage, not post installation.

Perhaps if Openreach employed more women they could introduce the concept of multi-tasking so that project plans can include tasks to be done simultaneously and not, as it appears now, only sequentially.

In reply to a post by gerarda:

Perhaps if Openreach employed more women they could introduce the concept of multi-tasking so that project plans can include tasks to be done simultaneously and not, as it appears now, only sequentially.

In my experience women aren't that much better at multi-tasking and attempting it causes more problems than it solves. I'd rather tasks are done sequentially and done properly than concurrently and done poorly. Mind you with openreach we don't seem to get either option

On the more serious side of women in engineering jobs:
You can't just go out and 'hire more women'. You can only hire the people who are available and sadly women have always been underrepresented in engineering. I'm not sure why but I suspect it starts at a very early age.

My experience of female computer programmers (a grand total of three during my thirty year career) is that they do more planning upfront and take the whole exercise more seriously. They seem better able to understand that they are controlling a machine whereas men often see the whole exercise as an ongoing dialog. I don't have enough data to say whether they do a better or worse job but I suspect that as with men their good points balance out their bad points and they do as well any human

In reply to a post by gerarda:

Perhaps if Openreach employed more women they could introduce the concept of multi-tasking so that project plans can include tasks to be done simultaneously and not, as it appears now, only sequentially.

What a sexist comment...

Could be the issue is the isp's not responding.

Oh dear.

Jokes are often a very good way of making a serious point. I think it an excellent and non-sexist OP about Openreach's often poor project planning. Then there are different multi-tasking capabilities between women and men has been researched several times - one example.

Openreach are dealing with a very complex process, but getting there with commendable speed. In many cases there is nothing wrong with their planning but the unforeseen involved in a lot of underground work on decades-old infrastructure built when computers hadn't even been invented, never mind data communications of the kind we now have, cannot sensibly be built into the plan. Along with that the triggering of each step for each individual cabinet seemed to be event-driven, in that it pointless to request power supply to a cabinet until it us known the FTTC cabinet will ultimately (a) exist, and (b) be precisely in the expected place. All that can be pre-arranged is that the power company involved is made aware of the installation plan with rough dates.

Add in local authority procedures and ....

They therefore apparently adopted the philosophy of team deployment in relatively small areas, but if a particular cabinet proved particularly awkward for some reason it does got temporarily or permanently dropped, in favour of the rest of the area, and the subsequent areas in the overall national project.

Hence all the ongoing delays many unfortunate end users experience, sometimes periods of years.

In the scenario the OP complains about we have an unusual situation, though by now it should be a standard procedure for the relevant department to be liaising with CPs about the changeover. Swapping the phone lines over is routine, but swapping from one FTTC cabinet to another far less so. The new one may even be fed from a different exchange.

Having said that, as an experienced project manager I consider the differences highlighted in the example research aren't highly relevant to what the OP is complaining about. It is a pure failure in the particular project planning, a skill of which I'm not aware of any male/female difference in performance.

So I disagree with the OP's humorously put suggestion. But was it being sexist? No!

It is the first time I've heard of there being a migration protocol to be agreed upon with ISPs (and their clients), though it certainly makes sense, and it raises a couple of questions...

- Perhaps ISPs have complained about the lack of a protocol, so this one is the guinea pig? It is the kind of thing I'd have expected to see in the BTW ISP Forum, but don't recall seeing it.

- The migration for previous FTTC customers is surely a combined one - the physical copper must be switched at the same time as the ports in the two DSLAMs are switched over.

As @gerarda says the copper has been switched over, does this mean
- FTTC customers weren't switched into the new PCP, or
- FTTC customers were switched into the new PCP, but remain in the old PCP too?

If the copper for non-FTTC subscribers has switched, then there doesn't need to be a hold-up that stops them ordering. Unless they use up all the resources too quickly.

There are women involved in project management of cabinet deployment. By sheer coincidence I happen to know one.

They have certainly done something to the fibre because my speed has dropped from a stable 2.2Mbps to an unstable 1.5, and the other person I know who has a "superfast" service has had his speed drop from 5Mb to 2Mb with the same lack of stability that I am now suffering from.

That may or may not be a related problem. Has your phone started crackling?

You seem to be saying you are on the old FTTC cabinet, whereas the impression I got from your OP was that you were frustrated at not being able to order FTTC.

Are people actually ordering and getting connected on the new one?

(And @WWombat)

I wonder if something we "know" doesn't happen has been temporarily done?

Is it possible all phone lines, including the OP's, have been transferred to the new cabinet but there is a problem of the kind I suggested previously? That the new FTTC cabinet is fed from a different exchange and the OP has temporarily been back-wired to the old one for FTTC? For whatever reason Openreach have wrt liaising with one or more of the existing CPs.

To my mind that could explain both the speed loss and possibly the instability now reported.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

It is the first time I've heard of there being a migration protocol to be agreed upon with ISPs (and their clients), though it certainly makes sense, and it raises a couple of questions...

I wonder if "protocol" actually means timings of the tasks rather than the actual tasks themselves. And it may also require the ISPs to have presence in a second exchange if the new cabinet is connected to a different exchange to the first.