In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Central heating not working, reported at 20:30 Friday evening. Engineer arrives 13:40 today (Saturday). Pump failure. Replaced. Leaves at 14:00, job complete.

And how much do you pay for that?

Add in if they don't have the part and have to order it..... Yep, will be as long as any other fix

I used to have BG contract for maintenance / fix on my central heating. It was more a month than I pay for my broadband and they aren't providing a constant service just a break/fix (and annual service). I dropped it when they wrote to me to tell me they could no longer support my boiler as it was too old.

Paying an insurance policy to allow something to be fixed is very different to paying for a constant service. Pay BT an insurance premium every month to cover broadband failure on top of the service charges and they might be quicker to fix.

What is Openreach line rental, WLR3, other than an insurance policy? They don't provide a service over it in the case of ADSLx, and in the case of VDSL2 they charge separately for that.

So if they turned off voice support no-one would complain? SOGEA is on the way for those that see line rental as a waste.

Gas and electric are very different in that unlimited supply options are not a consumer option

Also, try getting that level of response to central heating issues in the height of winter (assuming no guaranteed response contract).

I would say its poor value.

For £15 on EE as an example you can get a couple of gig of data, unlimited calls to 01/02/03 and mobile numbers, voice mail, call redirect, caller display.

On top of that, for chargeable calls there is no call connection fee and the phone can be used anywhere in the UK vs just at home.

For the £18 I pay sky I get no inclusive calls, no call redirect, call connection charges, no internet (is an additional product). Sky is unusual in that they provide caller display inclusive, most landline providers in the UK do not.

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 17-Jul-17 13:30:34)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

You've got some good points there, but I have always maintained the Openreach engineers do an excellent job. I have only once in my life found one who was not spot on, and that was not his fault. It was the lack proper training on something.

It's the management that's the problem. Note I did point out the user has to get past the ISP first, which is far from easy, but once it does get to Openreach it's the time from the report to an engineer being assigned and sent that is what I was commenting on.

I agree the OR engineer has a far more complex job, but they can't start on it until they are given it is the point.

For many years we lived in a small village where it was common for residents using BT as their ISP to get service to repair a fault within 2 working days. Equally common for residents with other ISPs to find it took 3 or 4 days for the ISP to get the message to Openreach that repair was needed after which 2 working days produced a fix.

Not unknown for a BT ISP report to fix several customers problems before other ISPs had even passed fault report to Openreach

when I was on freeserve adsl back in 2000 before ofcom created the mess we have now, I rang freeserve on a sunday afternoon about no sync on my frog modem (remember those? ) and by tea time it was working again, same day fix on a sunday.

But back then ofcom were not strangling BT.

You pay £18 to Sky, but the people delivering the copper phone line get how much?

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/7720-full-llu-li...

Prices have just dropped and more cuts on the way.

Current price works out at £7.03 (ex VAT), vat adds £1.41

As I said earlier openreach are been squeezed, but the only thing relevant to the consumer is what they pay their CP, and that is poor value. The average consumer doesnt care how much goes to openreach, just the value they get.

Edited by Chrysalis (Mon 17-Jul-17 18:07:32)