In reply to a post by MC31:

They find it hard to get good new guys

Is that good new engineers? Or good new management bods?

Absolutely, It's a perfect storm as far as pension fund managers go. BT has the largest deficit, but not by proportion of turnover. We are, of course, seeing the effects of central banks suppressing bind rates.

I don't even thing BT could afford £2bn a year. That would wipe out all but essential capex and pretty well all the dividends too. I do wonder if Sharon White has told her political masters the truth of all this. Even if she has, I suspect they aren't listening.

OR proposed that they should have a direct interface to customers. It was vetoed by the CPs (especially TalkTalk and Sky). So now there are mediating layers which will inevitable cause communication and delay problems

yep, I did typo in my post by the way, which I can no longer edit, I asked the mods to fix.

I meant to say its ofcom that dont want us communicating with openreach, to give the illusion of competition and to keep the CPs happy.

To me it has become very clear that CPs need removing from the contact between end user and openreach.

CPs shouldnt even be able to veto anything, who is regulating? them or ofcom.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 01-Dec-16 05:29:03)

The potential issue with direct contact with OR is then the blame game could become even more complex with the end user mediating between the two because they will both blame the other for any issues.

Most users wouldn't have a clue whether their Internet being down is due to the cable itself failing, something in the OR backhaul, their user authentication at the ISP, ISP backhaul to the Internet, ISP DNS services, ISP interlinks, IP address allocation, routing, etc, etc. If a user has to try and pinpoint whether it is OR or the ISP that is to blame for a problem then I personally think it would cause a lot of households serious headaches.

You may know who is to blame for a fault but most users don't and will not want to have to argue between 2 bodies to try and get one to take on the fix. At the moment they argue with the ISP and the ISP should sort it with OR if needed - it isn't working as well as it should but I think for most it is better than the alternative.

At the moment OR network is used by the likes of Sky and Talk Talk who seem to me to provide a very imperfect contact between the customer and the engineer if something goes wrong

Many times it may be something in the property that's causing the problem. But it is the job of the ISP to identify those and then get on to solve real problems outside the property. Too often there is delay and attempts to persuade the customer there is nothing wrong, especially where there is a working but totally unsatisfactory service.

Threats of "if we call an engineer and it turns out to be your fault it'll cost £150" or "wait for 10 days after a reboot and see if it's any better" are all too easy

In the meanwhile we see service standards being reduced by 3rd party ISPs

Ofcom not doing its job IMHO

The pension would not split. It stays with the BT Group. Existing Openrech staff would remmin frozen members of the BT group pensions scheme for new sercice they would become member of a new Openreach Pension scheme

It is not that difficult

� Who would own these shared exchange buildings? BT Group

� Which - TSO or Openreach (or indeed other Lines of Business: many buildings are occupied by employees from every BT Division) � would pay for their upkeep? BT Group


� What about the exchange equipment itself? BT Group except for specific Openrerewach plant


� How would BT partition the capital and running costs of this unified network? It would no longer be a unified network each company would pick up its own costs


� How would corporate overheads be partitioned between Openreach and BT? You dont. Each Company would hve its own corporate management and costs


� What about IT systems, which as an issue is potentially extremely significant? BT reports that it spent £1 billion on creating separate IT systems and processes (and, an even more complex exercise, migrating existing data and processes to them) as a result of the 2005 Undertakings. That separation exercise � which, eleven years after the Undertakings were signed, still has some residual elements ongoing due to its immense complexity � in the main �only� covered systems holding customer data. However, BT has many hundreds of �enterprise management� IT systems covering finance, HR, legal, resource management, procurement, supply chain, fleet management, internal communications, investor relations, etc. These are BT Group-wide systems, so do we have to go through a similar and extremely expensive exercise to that which was undertaken for systems holding customer data? Also, under the Undertakings BT is permitted, with appropriate safeguards, to host Openreach and Rest of BT systems in a single set of data centres. Would Openreach systems need to be moved to their own data centres? All of these

Each businss would have its own IT systems

I have a particularly illustrative story about the confusion in consumer's minds. My mother's next door neighbour, a (very active) widow in her mid-seventies was complaining to me about her BTinternet connection. She only does simple things like email and a bit of shopping and had been taught by her later husband how to turn the computer on. Basically press the silver (power) button on the PC and then turn the scree on.

Here complain was that she was having a lot of problem as, very often, when she went through this exercise she go an error message saying there was no signal, so she'd wondered what BT were up to. She'd also see a man working on a cabinet and thought that might have had something to do with her woes. A little questioning indicated that she wasn't using WiFi and that the lights on the BT box were all green.

Then, having been working on assumption that this error message had been output by the computer, it dawned on me that what she was seeing was the monitor reporting no signal on the video input. Essentially the computer (running WIndows 7) wasn't starting up properly. Most likely it was not waking up properly from a sleep (which I find is not unusual on desktops).

So, if you have users who can confuse a message from their monitor complaining about lack of a video input signal as a problem with their broadband, then almost anything is possible.

Indeed. That could easily have been a call to Openreach for her Internet being down if she didn't have access to someone who could help.