| Quote from: Matt |
We need to send an engineer because the fault is almost certainly on the wiring between the exchange and your premises. The reason he needs access is because he needs to be able to test any fixes he makes from your premises, it's not necessarily because that's where the fault is.
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Not sure that's totally necessary as the engineers can test the line quality outside a property without requiring the householder to be at home i.e. climb up the nearest telegraph pole or lift an inspection cover. But the Openreach policy seems to be that the fault must be tested in the home first and that is incredibly irritating for those of us who have to take a day off work on the off-chance that an Openreach engineer might turn up. Doesn't anyone in Openreach (or the ISPs) even consider how inconvenient it is for someone to take a day off work? In my experience, 100% of faults have been in the external network - that may be unusual, but the copper wire network in my area seems to be falling apart and many of my neighbours have had issues as well.
Openreach have performed absymally for the last three faults that I've raised - the worst was four years ago when they took several weeks and 10 engineer visits to fix a problem which was in an underground cable 100m from my house - 9 out of 10 engineers insisted on checking the fault in my property (the customer's always wrong seems to be their mantra...) but the 10th had the good sense (and professionalism) to painstakingly check the wiring at each connection down the road until he found the fault.
I had another fault at the end of May this year that took about 5 weeks to fix and a similar number of engineers to scratch their heads; the fault reappeared a week ago (coincidentally just after an engineer had "fixed" someone else's line fault...) and no engineer has even had a sniff at the fault yet - the latest excuse from PN was laughable: "Unfortunately a system issue at Openreach is affecting their ability to contact the controls department who are currently monitoring your fault." Well it won't get fixed quickly if they use their own engineers, that's for sure...
Maybe we ought to start a league table of fix times and engineer visits - I really hope that my own personal record of 10 engineer visits is unusual, but I suspect it isn't as rare as it should be...
And anyone who raises a fault is told that they'll be charged £60 if no fault is found. How about customers billing Openreach a similar amount for each engineer visit that failed to fix the problem - on that basis, they must owe me more than £900 already. Food for thought...
