In reply to a post by drummerjohn:

I place dozens of orders every year for the business I am in. I keep record of all failures.

Last year BT Openreach failed on 50% of the orders.

This year so far 62% failure rate.

Failures include: Not meeting their own expected date, not the correct quantity of lines installed against what was ordered, sometimes half the lines installed having faults from the outset, no sockets presented etc etc.

I speak to most of the engineers and I have had to train them on things like what a 4 line group consists of (1 line + 3aux group).

They are a joke. No doubt.

Exactly, and the point I'm trying to make is that they closed the job off after never visiting the end user but documented that they had spoken to the end user and confirmed the line was working fine.
They didn't!

I just read the T&C's for CTDA.

So basically an engineer does a JDSU PQT, and if it passes they allowed to walk without checking anything physically and charge a big fee.

How did the isp's allow themselves to be ripped off like that, wow.

Hence why AAISP fight tooth and nail over these things

I suspect that as Openreach becomes under more pressure regulatory wise, that charges for stuff like this will continue to rise until we get to a point where 'broadband insurance' becomes a market just like the water firms do.

Granted, there does seem to have been a problem with the notes on the system but a fault may have been rectified and the remote test showed as clear. A second fault may have started coincidentally after the initial fix or there were two to begin with.

Back in the days of valve radios, a common fault was that the mains rectifier diode would fail.


After replacement, quite frequently one or more of the other valves and/or the major electrolytic capacitors would fail, due to the new diode being more effective and thus the rectified voltage being higher.

Prior to that first failure, everything had been ageing "gracefully and in harmony".


Generally when the first repair had been carried out, it was impossible to accurately forecast what would be the next actual failure, except if the electrolytics were showing signs of weeping and/or bulging; and it was costly to replace all of the likelies - on a "just in case" basis.

In reply to a post by eckiedoo:

Back in the days of valve radios, a common fault was that the mains rectifier diode would fail......

Now you're making me nostalgic for tapping a Mullard EL81 with the handle of my 4BA nut spinner!

line rental really should cover this, the amount of people paying line rental but not using voice services must be massive.

I see this as ofcom failure, they too obsessed with minimising wholesale costs at BT's expense that this situation has came about.

I remember when I had freeserve adsl in 2000, before ofcom messed around with everything, I had a no sync fault early afternoon on a sunday, rang freeserve, by 4pm someone went to the exchange and fault fixed, no threat of charges etc.

Night and day difference since openreach formed.

incidently my old pair which I got swapped last year, passed many of these PQT's, finally after I pressed plusnet legally they sent a broadband boost engineer and I had the pair swapped. He told me the old pair was still only syncing at 50m at 100m from the cabinet, completely naffed. I asked him will it be marked bad, and he said no it be available for another customer to use on a new install or pair swap. These guys have no pride over quality control, just the bottom line counts.

Edited by Chrysalis (Fri 15-May-15 23:27:14)