Home phone provision over BT cables

[#1]

I'm on a BT line using the BT phone service. My neighbours are all on third-party phone service providers (Orange, Pipex and Talktalk). In early December the cable serving our end of the cul-de-sac finally gave up after 30 years, and (fortunately) I was the only one left with a working phone service. All my neighbours reported their individual problems to their respective phone providers, who duly passed on the problem to BT. What followed was an endless succession of "engineer" visits to their houses, all done on an individual basis, until it was finally realised by BT that there might be a collective problem. It took a further three weeks to sort it out, involving new cables, connections and circuit boards in the local cabinet.
Overall, they were without a phone service for almost six weeks. Question for PN....  seeing as how I'm thinking about going a total package with PN, could someone reassure me that cable faults don't normally take this long to get fixed? What's the mechanism for PN reporting such problems to BT? Is it similar to the broadband reporting arrangement?

[#2]

HI Nozzer,
Due to equivalence, we would raise faults to BT Openreach in the same way that all of their other customers would do.
We have no advantage or disadvantage other any other ISPs.

[#3]

Quote

seeing as how I'm thinking about going a total package with PN, could someone reassure me that cable faults don't normally take this long to get fixed?

Without using the classic analogy that relates to the length of a piece of string we can never define how long a fault would take to get fixed I'm afraid. 
As I'm sure you can appreciate each individual fault has its own level of impact and its own intricacies. Some may affect only one individual, some an entire street. However we will always do our very best to chase up faults pro actively after they've been reported to us and will push things along as fast as we can. I think you'd be very unfortunate to experience another fault like you mentioned.
As you may noticed I've helped out a lot of customers in the past with issues like that so if worst comes to worst and you experience another line fault give me a shout.
Adam

[#4]

@nozzer weve just had the experience see here http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,102047.msg866219.html#msg866219
We were off for five days but Openreach did identify that there was a common fault for all custmers on the street