Broadband (FTTC) migrated away without authorisation

Today I discovered that a FTTC broadband connection at the home of relatives was migrated from Aquiss to Sky three days ago without authorisation. To my knowledge, their Aquiss account is all in order and no communications were received about the matter until a support ticket was logged by a relative this afternoon. For avoidance of doubt their equipment has not been changed and they are not a customer of Sky. Their router still features the Aquiss username. I noticed because IP addresses had begun to change frequently and all are associated with Sky's ASN. Within one hour of opening the support ticket an Openreach engineer has arrived at their home to try to solve the problem. I find it perplexing to note that Internet access is functioning via Sky's network despite the lack of appropriate authentication details in their router. I think it would be a good idea to setup better monitoring on their router so if anything unexpected changes, we will be alerted.

Thank you to Martin from Aquiss for filing the fault with Openreach so quickly. We await the migration back!

Openreach has resolved the matter and my relatives are pleased to have returned into the service of Aquiss. It seems that a mistake was probably made by an engineer at the nearby cabinet.

I accept mistakes can be made. I am surprised broadband fully functioned without appropriate customer authentication in the connected router.

For the most part the authentication in the router isn't relevant. The patching to the ISP is controlled by Openreach and therefore you can only connect to an ISP if the relevant settings are made by Openreach. There is no real necessity for any authentication and BT haven't really used individual user authentication for years. The logging of your usage is done by the IP address and circuit identifier not by any authentication.

The interesting part is that sending a PPPoE login to Sky resulted in a connection being made, when they use DHCP for everything. Perhaps the router was falling back to some safe defaults but we'll never know.

In reply to a post by jpm:

The interesting part is that sending a PPPoE login to Sky resulted in a connection being made, when they use DHCP for everything. Perhaps the router was falling back to some safe defaults but we'll never know.

Sky use IPv6 PD to authenticate these days so most routers will authenticate on a sky service without really doing anything.