In reply to a post by RobertoS:

We know there is no guaranteed one-day response, and I'd be very surprised if Sky previously had a no-charge to the customer (even two-day)callout of Openreach to premises-internal issues.

It all has to be garbage.

Sky didn't charge for the 6 or so SFI's I had out for my fault... They also didn't push Openreach to swap the R-Dslam port despite being asked several times to even though that really was the next logical step in the diagnostic process given they'd already changed the pair, checked the DP's twice and I'd demonstrated the fault on at least 2 occasions. A quick look at the DLM/Sync history should have told them all they needed to know, but that would require the SFI to call their helldesk which most of them seemed reluctant to do.

Fault behaved like a HR fault in that Sync would drop out and not return unless you called the line or plugged a phone in and tried to use it, this was repeatable in the test socket yet the engineers TDR tests couldn't find the problem and since current on the line tended to temporally resolve it that made it even more difficult to pinpoint.

In the end I got fedup of the repeat visits with no progress being made and Sky let me out of the contract. Probably the cheapest option for them to be honest and I didn't see it progressing anytime soon.

From my experience dealing with them it seems easy enough to get them to book out an openreach engineer but they don't seem to have a process/team to handle repeat faults and escalate properly to ensure they're not going around in circles and that the engineer openreach send out is actually fully aware of the history of that line.


Edit:

This was on my 2nd line (I used to have 2) at the moment I've just got the AAISP line in terms of DSL, not sure what I want to do about the backup.

That said I'd probably still recommend Sky if a friend asked for a cheap(ish) provider given that they seem to be one of the better ones of the larger ISP's and I found them fairly easy to convince it needed an engineer. Lets face it the fault I had was probably one of the rarer ones, also if I'm right about the R-DSLAM port I feel sorry for the poor sod who gets that port next.

Edited by dragon2611 (Thu 06-Oct-16 18:54:44)

I came across one such engineer yesterday here in Lambeth. He had arrived to enable two new VDSL connections on our new AIO cabinet but when chatting to him he told me that he was unable to enable a neighbour's connection as there was a D-side fault on their line and that as he wasn't underground trained he wasn't allowed to access the DP in the footway.

As Mr.Weller once wrote, 'Dig The New Breed' ...... new boys (see them excitedly gossiping on this very forum) given [censored] all training and sent to work they should simply not, IMHO, be doing, yet. It is what the company wants .... sadly not what the customers need.

I had no problem getting Sky to book several OR guys to fix my Sky Fibre Pro line. I had a few problems with the OR guys but it was sorted in the end, at no cost to me.

Getting them to book engineers is easy, getting them escalate and hold openreach accountable when the engineers fail to progress the issue however seems to be the troublesome part.

Thankfully FTTC tends to be pretty reliable and most faults are probably less troublesome than the one I had.

That said at least Sky support seem to be able to actually notice when the computer is sending them down a stupid path and do something about it or at least the agent I had did.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Stopped promotion of Sky+ its all Sky Q now.

Yes, I realise that, but in no way does that mean sky+ is dead

The implications of ordering skyQ, quite apart from the cost of the hire, are far reaching insofar as you can't have sky+ in the same house, since the dish no longer services sky+

That, for me, is a no no, because my present system services 5 rooms. Try working out the cost of that via SkyQ

The stats are a side effect of a regulated firm that has to be seen to be doing things by the book and equally for all customers.

Given that I doubt the accountants allow openreach engineers much downtime in a day these days, if customer service is to improve massively more staff to deal with end-user affecting faults are needed, oh and another wave of staff to deal with a more fibre rich roll-out too.

Alas staff = money which will mean higher bills so probably not going to happen

Only my own view, but it seems to me that BT has been training new recruits to its engineering staff just about as fast as it is possible to go in recent times. These things don't happen overnight and it really is too easy for Sky and Talk Talk to carp while they do little to help

What has come out of this thread is the information about response times and what they cost and which ISP elects to pay for which quality of service

Why is this information not widely available to the consumer?

In reply to a post by 961a:

too easy for Sky and Talk Talk to carp while they do little to help

What should they do? This is Openreach's role.