I see both sides of it. One of my homes has a slow connection - and almost no chance of an upgrade. Even regional funding will not give us anything.

If this is an ADSL2+ service, then it may be worth looking at moving to a provider will no DLM or at least a less onerous one.

Openreach has a track record of not repairing infrastructure as you've found, the problem is getting the collective reporting to the volume level such that Openreach will take notice. The local engineers may know the problem, but have no authority to fix it.

Are you a BT shareholder worried about the effect this might have on your share price?

By that token why should BT ever do any network maintenance beyond the bare minimum? If it's running a manageable voice service to hell with anything else.

I presume you are in your last sentence suggesting that BT should be entitled to a completely vertically integrated service.

Wow, that works so well in the USA with Verizon and AT&T. The level of competition there is truly phenomenal, the prices a bargain.

If you're really lucky you're in one of the large sections of Verizon's network that they decided not to upgrade but instead sold off that doesn't even have ADSL 2+ and costs a fortune.

Sometimes companies of all kinds have to spend money that delivers no additional revenue. That's business, that's life. In the case of someone like BT, fortunate enough to be privatised with the assets they were, a level of control is absolutely essential to ensure something approaching a working market.

In reply to a post by MHC:

I see both sides of it. One of my homes has a slow connection - and almost no chance of an upgrade. Even regional funding will not give us anything.

Sell it to someone who'll actually use it as a home 365 days a year, problem solved.

If OR did allow only broadband and not have a voice requirement the amount of money they would lose is too high. It's the same if they were to fix all their broadband faults, they are simply hiding behind old legislation.

and I expect due to lots of lobbying that old legislation remains in place.

My old MP who was an ex cabinet minister is now on BT's board.

Not sure Openreach can afford to fix every bit of network to the standard people want to hold them too at least not at the price most of us want to pay for a residential/sme service.

Also a badly performing openreach should make it easy and attractive for all those people with millions to invest to build an alt network, i.e. wipe the floor with openreach by doing it better and faster.

openreach know full well that for a serious competitor to emerge (more than just the odd village) such a company would have to spend billions and as such is very unlikely to happen.

I suspect one such reason we have no state FTTP rollout is lobbying from BT. Realistically a state owned rollout is the only way BT will get local loop competition.

Then we have what MHC stated the situation, why would BT spend to fix their network when they know the consumer isnt going anywhere regardless?

Another interesting thing now is that the vectoring trials seem to only be producing speed increases of circa 10mbit which seems really poor given various people are reporting speeds drops much higher then that, so is it now possibly the case the huge speeds drops people are seeing are not all crosstalk related but rather a degrading network. We never know because openreach seem to actually only investigate very few faults, I suspect a fair chunk dont even make it to openreach due to threat of charges.

Ofcom did tell me that they plan to review the callout fee's as part of the margin squeeze test.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 28-Nov-13 17:29:15)

And if it was state owned it would be the first thing to feel the squeeze when government need to reduce costs or shift funding. Do you really want the funding for broadband to be competing with funding for NHS/roads/education/etc? It would lose every time.

We used to call it the GPO� no thanks.