News - Ofcom to get tough on sluggish broadband repairs and installs

[HEXUS]

From April 2014 BT Openreach will face fines for laggardly performance.

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[ik9000]

that seems to contradict itself. It says:

complete around 80% of fault repairs within one to two working days of being notified, irrespective of factors such as severe weather conditions;
provide an appointment for around 80% of new line installations within 12 working days of being notified, irrespective of factors such as severe weather conditions;

but then follows it with:

if there are factors out of Openreach's control, such as extreme weather getting in the way of it providing a timely service, then annual targets can be shifted down by one per cent for repairs and three per cent for installs.

So not so irrespective of severe weather then. Or at what point does severe weather become extreme?

[KrisWragg]

I would guess a bit of snow and ice taking out a handful of lines is severe weather. Gale force winds taking out the telephone cables for miles would be extreme weather?

[majesticmerc]

I'd say that snow and heavy rain would be classified as "severe weather", but extreme weather would be weather that poses a serious risk to the Open Reach staff (e.g. Lightning storms when repairing a telephone pole, serious flooding, that sort of thing).

[Smudger]

When Steve Irwin sticks his thumb up its butt, that's when it gets extreme.

[DemonHighwayman]

Quite frankly Ofcom are showing how weak they are, they should be leaping on these bad practices within weeks, not waiting a couple years to take any action.

[mcmiller]

Does this include Virgin Cable? They took 18 months to admit they had over subscribed the line... Their staff were (are) at best rude when i phoned them to up complain.

[crossy]

So not so irrespective of severe weather then. Or at what point does severe weather become extreme?

AFAIK it's the Met Office that makes the severe v's extreme call. Last time I heard "severe" = "travel with care", whereas "extreme" = "only travel if your journey is absolutely necessary or unavoidable".

Does this include Virgin Cable? They took 18 months to admit they had over subscribed the line... Their staff were (are) at best rude when i phoned them to up complain.

Virgin oversubscribing the cable? Judging on their forum that's not an unusual circumstance. That said, I've had no issues with either the first line engineers nor the call centre folks. Had continual problems with a leaking phone connection - "leaking" as in water was getting in and screwing it up - and the engineers were pretty apologetic that they could only put in temporary fixes.. Luckily (!!) some idiot* decided to drive a van over the man hole and knackered so badly that that they (Virgin's "network" folks) were forced to replace it.

(* and no, that idiot wasn't me - it was someone else's contractor)

Presumably OpenReach are particularly bad - judging by the jokes that everyone else makes - although why this benchmark isn't applied to everyone escapes me, or is it just that OpenReach was singled out for special attention?

[ik9000]

Presumably OpenReach are particularly bad - judging by the jokes that everyone else makes - although why this benchmark isn't applied to everyone escapes me, or is it just that OpenReach was singled out for special attention?

Presumably because there are really only 2 networks in the country: BT and Virgin aka cable & wireless. So all the LLU options the government relies on to pretend there is "competition" are at the mercy of BT.

True competition would be the government pulling their finger out their backside and getting chain gangs of juvenile offenders to dig data trenches along every road in the country, into which any contractor is later free to install their own cabling. Again, government-funded data centres/server/switch banks could be set up, much like the exchanges, but with surplus capacity and room for IPs to install their own kit. Then we might get true competition and innovative start-ups might be able to do something special. It is ridiculous that to get internet you have to sign up to a landline. FFS, what BS.