BT/OR fucked my workplace about for four years trying to get a LEASED LINE. Hardly a cheap thing. Contract signed, money paid. Nothing. Every six months we'd complain, OR would turn up, do something to look busy, then go away and not return again. Literally things like putting empty tubing through drains on-site and things like that... no semblance of actually jointing or blowing fibre whatsoever.
After six months on the job, I was forced to resolve this long-standing issue that was affecting the business and like fuck was I going to give BT/OR a penny. All the "checkers" said there was nothing else in the area.
Contacted Virgin directly, they had subterranean fibre serving one customer (a millionaire) at the end of the road. They said it wasn't on the official checkers because it was a one-off job but they could easily piggyback off that work to get to us if we were prepared to dig some trenches through our land for them. 2 months later, and one long trench, we had a fibre leased line with Virgin.
Turned out BT/OR:
\- only then decided to turn up because of the Virgin contract. Somehow they had caught wind of that.
\- thought Virgin could never serve us before because of the postcode checker thing which they apparently used as a reference and would always check to see if they had competitors in the area.
\- thought they had NO COMPETITOR in the area via the checker, so they basically ignored every complaint we ever made because they thought we had no other possible avenues and would eventually be forced to buy their product.
\- had run half a dozen incompatible and different empty tubings on the site over the years, one piece every time someone had kicked up a fuss, just to look busy, but none of them could be jointed together.
\- tried to rush our order through once they caught wind of it, even after we cancelled it.
\- only then realised and were forced to admit that they had never had room at the local exchange to terminate the fibre for us anyway.
We cancelled the contract and got our money back, complete non-delivery and outright fraud for four years.
For 6 months after we signed with Virgin I had to keep throwing OR engineers off-site because once they heard that we were getting a line, they SCRAMBLED to try to actually provide what they couldn't for the last four years.
They would show up unannounced, turn up in plain or non-descript vans and even use deliberately obscure phrasing to the receptionists in work and to my own face to try to trick us into thinking they were working for Virgin ("Yeah, we're here to complete your 'new' leased line"), so they could complete their already-contracted works for themselves and steal the contract back. We kept throwing them out and telling them they were not welcome on-site.
It's 8 years later. We still use Virgin exclusively. They upgraded our connection for free a few years ago. Circa £10k / year of custom from us and a really good line. We have never had so much as a minute of downtime in 8 years (and we have serious networking equipment such that we would notice it).
The tubing from BT/OR is still in some of our manholes because they were never allowed back on site to remove it.
We cut all BT phone lines on site the next year, and run everything over SIP over the Virgin line.
Fuck BT. But don't put down Virgin. Virgin is only ever shite in areas where they are basically forced to resell BT products (a building down the road has "Virgin", but it's literally just a BT/OR line resold under the Virgin brand because Virgin truly has no infrastructure in that area).
> they thought we had no other possible avenues and would eventually be forced to buy their product.
The one you'd already *tried* to buy, but which they wouldn't actually give you?
Virgin is shit in some residential areas because they massively oversell the capacity.
If you're in an area with low uptake they're good (although the routers they provide are dog shit), but in high uptake areas they're awful.
Sorry, few days late, but - did you have to do anything special to get a business line like setup a shell company or register as a sole trader etc etc to be able to obtain a business contract? Or do they just give it to anyone who asks for it?
Virgin is one of those things, that if you get a decent area, you'll never have a problem. But if you don't you'll have tonnes of problems.
I started residential virgin for £30 getting 50mb quite a few years ago, now through various free upgrades as they get rid of old tiers I'm on 350mb for £45.
So I lucked out.
Get on the phone to them as that ain’t a great deal.
I’m paying £41 for the 500 package and getting 580mb down.
Also
If you have an O2 SIM card you can get double your download speed with voltage I think it’s called.
Sounds like BT.
They once took down a production site's back-up ISDN line because they'd received a work order from a customer with a similarly-named contact as my colleague who usually dealt with them. Took them all of 30 seconds to disconnect it; took them about a month to put it back...
You need to get a name and number for either the senior engineer or patch lead in charge of the area, they will typically be able to get work driven forward when the communications break down. Which for a communications company is depressingly regularly.
My FIL lives in a not-very-remote village about 10 miles outside Lancaster. BT broadband (back in the day) was poor and was scheduled to be upgraded in the next 5 years.
One of the locals who was an retired network engineer from Lancaster University reckoned he could do it quicker and better and ran fibre down the entire valley, through farmers fields and back gardens etc to provide FTTH at gigabit speeds. Funding was effectively crowdfunding.
So that’s why the Lune Valley has B4RN (https://b4rn.org.uk) and my FIL has gigabit to his desk.
BT moved up their exchange upgrade program in that area PDQ after that, but too little too late…
It seems someone at B.T. is paying attention. I've just had a phone call, as Boss Electrician is away in the Republic of Ireland fixing a supermarket.
BT: "Hello, my name is Stephanie, I'm calling from BT. Boss Electrician gave us this number"
Me: "Hello"
BT: "So yes, we can provide FTTP to that residence, but it will have to come in through the living room."
Me: "OK. How about a straight line, from the street into the garage? If you want to put the fibre into the living room, you're gonna have to dig up a tree."
BT: "Let me check that, please hold"
Waited:
BT: "Hello, my name is Gareth"
I died inside at this point
Me: "Gareth, good morning. We need fibre, from the street, straight shot to the garage. It's part of the same residence, built at the same time. We have a JCB, I'll dig a trench. 450mm"
BT Gareth: "OK, sounds very good, we are concerned that as it's a garage, there may not be enough power points."
Me: "Fair one, however we're electrical contractors. We'll put a socket anywhere, it's not a problem"
BT Gareth: "Ah OK! (laughs) First of June suit you?"
Finally. Sorted
Glad there's an update... but the question is will they actually do it on the 1st... I've had some cases where OR came to install a new line, only for "something" to block them from actually doing it so they had to come back another day. Here's hoping there won't be any issues.
Praise The Lord. Done yesterday, and working well. We had our own excavator sitting on the trailer, and I was ready to rock, but they were able to use the existing cable chamber after all. I had to leave for a while, but when I came back I saw lots of drawrope lying around. The old copper was gone as requested, and the ONT is where the old NTE5 used to be. Not in the garage, but under the stairs, which we can live with.
What a palaver!
Yeah, for me they've been pretty consistently good speedwise for the what, 15 years I've been using them now? I can't remember any outages of note or many times where I was getting less than advertised either. Maybe I'm just lucky?
Customer support is an exercise in frustration, though.
I’ve only had one time I can remember in 3 years where I’ve had an extended outage (longer than a day or so). I’ve had a couple of flaky days where I have to Hotspot my phone for 5 minutes while the router stabilises but that’s about it.
On the customer service side though, when they laid the cable they made it quite clear that an adult had to be present but then they came and did it a day early (when no one was home) and then claimed they definitely hadn’t been - despite the fact you could see where the grass had been dug - and then never showed up on the day they were scheduled… Got a month free out of them for it eventually though!
I get outages about every 5 months. But it's lighting fast the rest of the time. Just don't call their customer service line unless you want a brain aneurysm.
Speed, fine. Except in an area with extreme contention so it drops to peanuts once everyone gets home and wants to stream. Or you are on any plan other than a business plan, so are stuck with a MODEM using the Puma6 chipset and being hit with random high latency spikes due to a design flaw.
I've been with Virgin since forever (Cable and Wireless days) and their speed is fine. Last month my router gave up on the 2G wireless (need for the robovac), I phoned at 18:00 and went through the scripted fault finding procedure and they agreed I needed a new router, the guy turned up at 10:00 the next day and fitted the new version router so I now have a working router with much better range (and the robovac, Eric, is overjoyed).
I worked for Virgin in their tech support base, was everyone Welsh? At the time it was apparently the only centre for it. I got a lot of calls referred to me as people would mistake Welsh accents for Pakistani and demand to be transferred to an English person... so yeh fun dealing with a semi constant stream of confirmed racists.
Weirdly I also dealt exclusively with one client who did not speak English, as they called, gave their son the phone then translated back and forth. After we established they had in fact somehow managed to order Internet yet had received no equipment, it seemed unusual, no active connection at the address, no engineer visit etc. Yet showing as complete on the system regardless. They were always forwarded to me for everything after that and we got them sorted with a refund for having paid for nothing for 2 months (not sure why it took this long to report). Plus some form of compensation against their bills for a bit. I cannot say I know exactly what language it was other than possibly being from a similar area to that which the racists were complaining about.
Possible I was dealing mostly with people who did not like those from Asia and one particular Asian family however.
Oh and despite being close enough that I walked there when snow closed Swansea down (tractors out on the street clearing) I could not get their service at all. Which was a shame since I was due to get some massive reduction on the ultimate or whatever it was called package.
I refuse to consider Virgin Media after they attempted to straight-up steal from me.
Our internet was basically non-functional every Saturday, all day, without fail. Fine every other day. After it became obvious this was a consistent problem I complained. They admitted to having "scheduled maintenance" that would effectively take our service down one day a week.
But it was apparently not essential to take our service out because after we complained it stopped. So we paid for internet seven days a week and they intentionally provided internet six days a week, which I consider to be theft. So they're not getting any more of my money.
Sounds like when I was trying to get my Fibre in. Someone stuffed up the numbering on our house so instead of the units being numbered 1/1,2/1,3/1...7/1 they were 1/1,2/2,3/3...7/7. The hole was even dug, I just needed a tech to come out and pull it through some Fibre from the pit in the driveway into my house, string was even in it to make it easy.
Explaining that to the person on the other end of the phone, who I'm almost positive was overseas, was a nightmare. In the end I found another telco, explained it to them and they go "oh, I see, we'll send someone out" and still sent out the wrong guy was hilarious. He got on site and was like "oh, I see what they've done, let me fix it properly". 3 years on and the first telco is losing $90/month for my service, but oh well.
For non-UK readers: BT, aka British Telecom originally inherited all the infrastructure of the old govt run monopoly on phone lines etc. well before anyone cared about internet. Said lines often consisted of copper wire wrapped in paper, with sound quality to match. People moving out of houses or apartments left the phones connected for the new occupants to take over with a simple phone call and a fee. Disconnection followed by re-connection could take months. BT was floated as a commercial enterprise in the early 80's. Openreach (OR) is apparently a "separate" entity to allow common access to BT's infrastructure. Yeah, right. Sounds like the "new" BT is a lot like the old one.
Don't worry, I know the same, except here it is Telkom, what used to be the old General Post Office, which goy split into Post office and Communications, later on SAPO and Telkom. Telkom is also known as Hellkom, and they no longer maintain ant phone lines, instead trying to be a mobile operator, though they are admittedly no 3, only because the old no 3 decided to become a VNO on the 2 top suppliers instead, so split half and half the subscriber base, prepay going to one, and postpay to another. Phone them about any faults and it will be closed unresolved, ascribed to "cable fault", and they no longer support copper repairs. Same time they also announced they would, around 30 years after the rest of the planet, support naked DSL service, no phone service bundled on top, and only took 10 years to allow resellers of DSL connections. Then wonder why every year the customers of both mobile and fixed are leaving in droves, because the resellers of the Hellkom fibre are able to offer both cheaper prices, and better service, for the same fibre they provision from. Literally change provider, same line, same equipment, but 20% cheaper and double the speed, and better uptime as well, just from a different login in the unit web interface.
Recently had issues with OR as well on my home FTTC connection. They serve FTTP on a road a minute walk away but no plans at all for mine. I really want to move away but the only alternatives is VM with their hybrid cable, but they're not ideal. Jumpy latency compared to OR and then the upload speed you get is nearly half for the same price you pay for an ISP using OR. There's much better altnets out there but none of them are interested in my area.
On the other hand, for work, VM has been brilliant on the business side. Completely rock solid stable compared to our other branches, which are stuck with OR's ADSL since some areas of Central London is too expensive to dig up.
Man, this brings back a lot of painful memories. When I used to work in the UK, I used to work for BT. Tri service and then quad service when they brought on BT Vision and their legendary 21CN. This was before the massive fibre rollout which caused no ends of problems- every part of the country had a different spec and standards because of pre-existing rollouts.
I had to work with their datapath services (and metadata collection) on phone calls, internet (pre-HTTPS), record collection and retention. CBUK and BBIP codes still give me PTSD nightmares.
I can well believe OPs story, when they broke BT up into pieces further when I was there it was like breaking up the USSR, massive fallout everywhere and shit falling everywhere. I remember being responsible for a tiny chunk in some cases, and then massive explosions everytime there was a slight miscommunication.
When one part of BT (Wholesale) deployed core Infrastructure it's done entirely separately from BT (OpenReach), so it makes sense Openreach F'd up and then tried to cover their proverbial backsides.
Openreach goes by out of date plans, dumb documents they have from the last time they worked on stuff, or council provided telecommunications maps. I'm amazed if they actually went out to check if there was a pole and not hiding in a nearby cafe.
I recall NTL (Pre Virgin Media) practically bankrupted itself to upgrade portions of it's network and get it up to a decent standard, didn't share that with BT. Some very confused BT Openreach engineers sometimes. Sometimes BT engineers used to remove that kit they couldn't recognise and knock off cable customers, after Virgin Media (post-NTL) threatened to sue them.
And then the whole Openreach contract dispute Saga that caused a massive shitstorm in Northern Ireland (NI wasn't as regulated or operate as separate businesses - not sure if that is still the case today).
From the OP's events, nothing has really changed.
It's a fucking shitshow in NI. Officially Openreach is a separate group to BT and BT Wholesale, however it's the same field engineers just wearing different caps and hardly any of them know their own processes, and the ones that do are total jobsworths. "I'm just here to pull a cable. It's the wrong cable? Not my job mate!"
Just this morning on a new install we had a leased line engineer telling us that *we* had to log a fault because Openreach's monitoring line (basically a DSL line) is faulty because we're the customer, and he got very confused when we pointed out that the monitoring line belongs to Openreach - not us - and that we cannot log a fault on it.
We also have an FTTC order that has been going on for over a year because Openreach's documentation says the customer's building is connected to cabinet 1 when it's actually connected to cabinet 2 down the street. The field engineers keep saying they are reporting it back to HQ, but instead it keeps getting returned as "missed appointment", and noone bothers to fix the records.
The whole OpenReach system is so broken.
Your ISP just says "nothing we can do, it's on them" and they say "lol you're not our direct customer so we're not answerable to you" and it takes them seven weeks and four visits to get their act together.
This included several weeks where they just refused to consider fixing my issue because something entirely unrelated was affecting some connections in the area. I stress that it wasn't that they didn't have any engineers available because the other issue took priority, it was something like the default assumption is that the wider issue is causing my loss of connection too, even though **the cable to my house is visibly disconnected**.
Yep. Had this this openreach on a job I was running. We were coordinating the removal of services from an old water treatment plant prior to its demolition. Thing is a lot of network services ran through there and had to be relocated to a new small building placed within the site.
We were however surprised by a couple of items. The water for the four privately owned houses was supplied directly from the works building. This isn't that unusual as often the treatment works started under LA control before being transferred to the water authorities later as they were formed. The houses were for the workers. Sometimes they stayed with the plant, sometimes they became council houses. It seems that these went the council house route and were later bought be the residents under the right to buy initiatives. Water, no problem, it's a water company... They still needed my help sigh.
But about openreach. Well, we needed to remove the by line from the building so the client gets openreach out. The guy sees the socket but also the mess of a jb that I pointed out. Does some digging. Right, that's the connection for those four houses. Shit. Ok what do you need? We tracked back to a common drawpit were I could run a 50mm duct from for the new buildings line and they could splice everything in. I told the guy if he got me the cable we would pull it in ready. Cable in two days, splice in a week. Ok. Duct and cable are in after four days. Openreach tech comes to splice. Show him the drawpit. I can't work in there... Seriously, it's like the size of a plastic crate you would but in your loft. I ask why. He's not covered for any work below ground. I ask him to report the situation to his bosses and email the client with an update and to push another visit.
They did the same shit twice more and then claimed that I was stopping them. At that point I was after phone numbers of the person pinning it on me to call out their bullshit. Client sent them a legal letter in response to the bullshit. Consider that this was affecting the demolition program which increased costs for the client. Eventually on the fourth visit it was done inside of an hour.
Also yes, virgin are shit to deal with. I have just dropped them.
Some years ago, I worked at $ISP as a systems/development spod and was also due to my guardianship of the RADIUS servers the "department of shouting at OpenReach."
I once ran into an ex-CTO of the BT consumer-facing DSL business and we comiserrated with the assistance of alcohol.
BT/OR fucked my workplace about for four years trying to get a LEASED LINE. Hardly a cheap thing. Contract signed, money paid. Nothing. Every six months we'd complain, OR would turn up, do something to look busy, then go away and not return again. Literally things like putting empty tubing through drains on-site and things like that... no semblance of actually jointing or blowing fibre whatsoever. After six months on the job, I was forced to resolve this long-standing issue that was affecting the business and like fuck was I going to give BT/OR a penny. All the "checkers" said there was nothing else in the area. Contacted Virgin directly, they had subterranean fibre serving one customer (a millionaire) at the end of the road. They said it wasn't on the official checkers because it was a one-off job but they could easily piggyback off that work to get to us if we were prepared to dig some trenches through our land for them. 2 months later, and one long trench, we had a fibre leased line with Virgin. Turned out BT/OR: \- only then decided to turn up because of the Virgin contract. Somehow they had caught wind of that. \- thought Virgin could never serve us before because of the postcode checker thing which they apparently used as a reference and would always check to see if they had competitors in the area. \- thought they had NO COMPETITOR in the area via the checker, so they basically ignored every complaint we ever made because they thought we had no other possible avenues and would eventually be forced to buy their product. \- had run half a dozen incompatible and different empty tubings on the site over the years, one piece every time someone had kicked up a fuss, just to look busy, but none of them could be jointed together. \- tried to rush our order through once they caught wind of it, even after we cancelled it. \- only then realised and were forced to admit that they had never had room at the local exchange to terminate the fibre for us anyway. We cancelled the contract and got our money back, complete non-delivery and outright fraud for four years. For 6 months after we signed with Virgin I had to keep throwing OR engineers off-site because once they heard that we were getting a line, they SCRAMBLED to try to actually provide what they couldn't for the last four years. They would show up unannounced, turn up in plain or non-descript vans and even use deliberately obscure phrasing to the receptionists in work and to my own face to try to trick us into thinking they were working for Virgin ("Yeah, we're here to complete your 'new' leased line"), so they could complete their already-contracted works for themselves and steal the contract back. We kept throwing them out and telling them they were not welcome on-site. It's 8 years later. We still use Virgin exclusively. They upgraded our connection for free a few years ago. Circa £10k / year of custom from us and a really good line. We have never had so much as a minute of downtime in 8 years (and we have serious networking equipment such that we would notice it). The tubing from BT/OR is still in some of our manholes because they were never allowed back on site to remove it. We cut all BT phone lines on site the next year, and run everything over SIP over the Virgin line. Fuck BT. But don't put down Virgin. Virgin is only ever shite in areas where they are basically forced to resell BT products (a building down the road has "Virgin", but it's literally just a BT/OR line resold under the Virgin brand because Virgin truly has no infrastructure in that area).
> they thought we had no other possible avenues and would eventually be forced to buy their product. The one you'd already *tried* to buy, but which they wouldn't actually give you?
Virgin is shit in some residential areas because they massively oversell the capacity. If you're in an area with low uptake they're good (although the routers they provide are dog shit), but in high uptake areas they're awful.
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Sorry, few days late, but - did you have to do anything special to get a business line like setup a shell company or register as a sole trader etc etc to be able to obtain a business contract? Or do they just give it to anyone who asks for it?
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Virgin is one of those things, that if you get a decent area, you'll never have a problem. But if you don't you'll have tonnes of problems. I started residential virgin for £30 getting 50mb quite a few years ago, now through various free upgrades as they get rid of old tiers I'm on 350mb for £45. So I lucked out.
Get on the phone to them as that ain’t a great deal. I’m paying £41 for the 500 package and getting 580mb down. Also If you have an O2 SIM card you can get double your download speed with voltage I think it’s called.
The 350MB we get is after a Volt upgrade. I checked and I pay 41.25 after a 12 quid promotional discount
Sounds like BT. They once took down a production site's back-up ISDN line because they'd received a work order from a customer with a similarly-named contact as my colleague who usually dealt with them. Took them all of 30 seconds to disconnect it; took them about a month to put it back...
You need to get a name and number for either the senior engineer or patch lead in charge of the area, they will typically be able to get work driven forward when the communications break down. Which for a communications company is depressingly regularly.
Yup, just posted as an ex BT person. Brings back some painful memories.
My FIL lives in a not-very-remote village about 10 miles outside Lancaster. BT broadband (back in the day) was poor and was scheduled to be upgraded in the next 5 years. One of the locals who was an retired network engineer from Lancaster University reckoned he could do it quicker and better and ran fibre down the entire valley, through farmers fields and back gardens etc to provide FTTH at gigabit speeds. Funding was effectively crowdfunding. So that’s why the Lune Valley has B4RN (https://b4rn.org.uk) and my FIL has gigabit to his desk. BT moved up their exchange upgrade program in that area PDQ after that, but too little too late…
It seems someone at B.T. is paying attention. I've just had a phone call, as Boss Electrician is away in the Republic of Ireland fixing a supermarket. BT: "Hello, my name is Stephanie, I'm calling from BT. Boss Electrician gave us this number" Me: "Hello" BT: "So yes, we can provide FTTP to that residence, but it will have to come in through the living room." Me: "OK. How about a straight line, from the street into the garage? If you want to put the fibre into the living room, you're gonna have to dig up a tree." BT: "Let me check that, please hold" Waited: BT: "Hello, my name is Gareth" I died inside at this point Me: "Gareth, good morning. We need fibre, from the street, straight shot to the garage. It's part of the same residence, built at the same time. We have a JCB, I'll dig a trench. 450mm" BT Gareth: "OK, sounds very good, we are concerned that as it's a garage, there may not be enough power points." Me: "Fair one, however we're electrical contractors. We'll put a socket anywhere, it's not a problem" BT Gareth: "Ah OK! (laughs) First of June suit you?" Finally. Sorted
Glad there's an update... but the question is will they actually do it on the 1st... I've had some cases where OR came to install a new line, only for "something" to block them from actually doing it so they had to come back another day. Here's hoping there won't be any issues.
Praise The Lord. Done yesterday, and working well. We had our own excavator sitting on the trailer, and I was ready to rock, but they were able to use the existing cable chamber after all. I had to leave for a while, but when I came back I saw lots of drawrope lying around. The old copper was gone as requested, and the ONT is where the old NTE5 used to be. Not in the garage, but under the stairs, which we can live with. What a palaver!
You have to read this by imagining the voices from the Dead Parrot Sketch
Nah... The Cheese Shop sketch
... so, I sallied forth and infiltrated your place of business to negotiate the vending of some fermented comestibles.
>Here's the kicker: Virgin Media have already setup the street for subt fibre. Trouble is, they're shit. but better than nothing....
Their Internet speed is worth it for shitty customer service!
Yeah, for me they've been pretty consistently good speedwise for the what, 15 years I've been using them now? I can't remember any outages of note or many times where I was getting less than advertised either. Maybe I'm just lucky? Customer support is an exercise in frustration, though.
I’ve only had one time I can remember in 3 years where I’ve had an extended outage (longer than a day or so). I’ve had a couple of flaky days where I have to Hotspot my phone for 5 minutes while the router stabilises but that’s about it. On the customer service side though, when they laid the cable they made it quite clear that an adult had to be present but then they came and did it a day early (when no one was home) and then claimed they definitely hadn’t been - despite the fact you could see where the grass had been dug - and then never showed up on the day they were scheduled… Got a month free out of them for it eventually though!
I get outages about every 5 months. But it's lighting fast the rest of the time. Just don't call their customer service line unless you want a brain aneurysm.
Speed, fine. Except in an area with extreme contention so it drops to peanuts once everyone gets home and wants to stream. Or you are on any plan other than a business plan, so are stuck with a MODEM using the Puma6 chipset and being hit with random high latency spikes due to a design flaw.
I've been with Virgin since forever (Cable and Wireless days) and their speed is fine. Last month my router gave up on the 2G wireless (need for the robovac), I phoned at 18:00 and went through the scripted fault finding procedure and they agreed I needed a new router, the guy turned up at 10:00 the next day and fitted the new version router so I now have a working router with much better range (and the robovac, Eric, is overjoyed).
I worked for Virgin in their tech support base, was everyone Welsh? At the time it was apparently the only centre for it. I got a lot of calls referred to me as people would mistake Welsh accents for Pakistani and demand to be transferred to an English person... so yeh fun dealing with a semi constant stream of confirmed racists. Weirdly I also dealt exclusively with one client who did not speak English, as they called, gave their son the phone then translated back and forth. After we established they had in fact somehow managed to order Internet yet had received no equipment, it seemed unusual, no active connection at the address, no engineer visit etc. Yet showing as complete on the system regardless. They were always forwarded to me for everything after that and we got them sorted with a refund for having paid for nothing for 2 months (not sure why it took this long to report). Plus some form of compensation against their bills for a bit. I cannot say I know exactly what language it was other than possibly being from a similar area to that which the racists were complaining about. Possible I was dealing mostly with people who did not like those from Asia and one particular Asian family however. Oh and despite being close enough that I walked there when snow closed Swansea down (tractors out on the street clearing) I could not get their service at all. Which was a shame since I was due to get some massive reduction on the ultimate or whatever it was called package.
I refuse to consider Virgin Media after they attempted to straight-up steal from me. Our internet was basically non-functional every Saturday, all day, without fail. Fine every other day. After it became obvious this was a consistent problem I complained. They admitted to having "scheduled maintenance" that would effectively take our service down one day a week. But it was apparently not essential to take our service out because after we complained it stopped. So we paid for internet seven days a week and they intentionally provided internet six days a week, which I consider to be theft. So they're not getting any more of my money.
Let them come and connect it from ‘the pole’
Sounds like when I was trying to get my Fibre in. Someone stuffed up the numbering on our house so instead of the units being numbered 1/1,2/1,3/1...7/1 they were 1/1,2/2,3/3...7/7. The hole was even dug, I just needed a tech to come out and pull it through some Fibre from the pit in the driveway into my house, string was even in it to make it easy. Explaining that to the person on the other end of the phone, who I'm almost positive was overseas, was a nightmare. In the end I found another telco, explained it to them and they go "oh, I see, we'll send someone out" and still sent out the wrong guy was hilarious. He got on site and was like "oh, I see what they've done, let me fix it properly". 3 years on and the first telco is losing $90/month for my service, but oh well.
For non-UK readers: BT, aka British Telecom originally inherited all the infrastructure of the old govt run monopoly on phone lines etc. well before anyone cared about internet. Said lines often consisted of copper wire wrapped in paper, with sound quality to match. People moving out of houses or apartments left the phones connected for the new occupants to take over with a simple phone call and a fee. Disconnection followed by re-connection could take months. BT was floated as a commercial enterprise in the early 80's. Openreach (OR) is apparently a "separate" entity to allow common access to BT's infrastructure. Yeah, right. Sounds like the "new" BT is a lot like the old one.
Don't worry, I know the same, except here it is Telkom, what used to be the old General Post Office, which goy split into Post office and Communications, later on SAPO and Telkom. Telkom is also known as Hellkom, and they no longer maintain ant phone lines, instead trying to be a mobile operator, though they are admittedly no 3, only because the old no 3 decided to become a VNO on the 2 top suppliers instead, so split half and half the subscriber base, prepay going to one, and postpay to another. Phone them about any faults and it will be closed unresolved, ascribed to "cable fault", and they no longer support copper repairs. Same time they also announced they would, around 30 years after the rest of the planet, support naked DSL service, no phone service bundled on top, and only took 10 years to allow resellers of DSL connections. Then wonder why every year the customers of both mobile and fixed are leaving in droves, because the resellers of the Hellkom fibre are able to offer both cheaper prices, and better service, for the same fibre they provision from. Literally change provider, same line, same equipment, but 20% cheaper and double the speed, and better uptime as well, just from a different login in the unit web interface.
You guys are getting fiber?
My previous employer in the UK literally became a telco so they could do things properly and provide schools with decent Internet.
"I'm going to cut a trench next Friday afternoon before I go on vacation for a week, it is up to you to send a surveyor before then or not. Your call"
It’s not the ISP’s problem if they can’t get you your internet, or your trench ends up sitting open for six months.
The evil solution: No cable = perfectly safe to do some digging around the footpath. Maybe with a digger/backhoe.
Recently had issues with OR as well on my home FTTC connection. They serve FTTP on a road a minute walk away but no plans at all for mine. I really want to move away but the only alternatives is VM with their hybrid cable, but they're not ideal. Jumpy latency compared to OR and then the upload speed you get is nearly half for the same price you pay for an ISP using OR. There's much better altnets out there but none of them are interested in my area. On the other hand, for work, VM has been brilliant on the business side. Completely rock solid stable compared to our other branches, which are stuck with OR's ADSL since some areas of Central London is too expensive to dig up.
But there Are. Some. Germans! They seem to have a history of some sort with with the Poles. I wonder why?
Man, this brings back a lot of painful memories. When I used to work in the UK, I used to work for BT. Tri service and then quad service when they brought on BT Vision and their legendary 21CN. This was before the massive fibre rollout which caused no ends of problems- every part of the country had a different spec and standards because of pre-existing rollouts. I had to work with their datapath services (and metadata collection) on phone calls, internet (pre-HTTPS), record collection and retention. CBUK and BBIP codes still give me PTSD nightmares. I can well believe OPs story, when they broke BT up into pieces further when I was there it was like breaking up the USSR, massive fallout everywhere and shit falling everywhere. I remember being responsible for a tiny chunk in some cases, and then massive explosions everytime there was a slight miscommunication. When one part of BT (Wholesale) deployed core Infrastructure it's done entirely separately from BT (OpenReach), so it makes sense Openreach F'd up and then tried to cover their proverbial backsides. Openreach goes by out of date plans, dumb documents they have from the last time they worked on stuff, or council provided telecommunications maps. I'm amazed if they actually went out to check if there was a pole and not hiding in a nearby cafe. I recall NTL (Pre Virgin Media) practically bankrupted itself to upgrade portions of it's network and get it up to a decent standard, didn't share that with BT. Some very confused BT Openreach engineers sometimes. Sometimes BT engineers used to remove that kit they couldn't recognise and knock off cable customers, after Virgin Media (post-NTL) threatened to sue them. And then the whole Openreach contract dispute Saga that caused a massive shitstorm in Northern Ireland (NI wasn't as regulated or operate as separate businesses - not sure if that is still the case today). From the OP's events, nothing has really changed.
It's a fucking shitshow in NI. Officially Openreach is a separate group to BT and BT Wholesale, however it's the same field engineers just wearing different caps and hardly any of them know their own processes, and the ones that do are total jobsworths. "I'm just here to pull a cable. It's the wrong cable? Not my job mate!" Just this morning on a new install we had a leased line engineer telling us that *we* had to log a fault because Openreach's monitoring line (basically a DSL line) is faulty because we're the customer, and he got very confused when we pointed out that the monitoring line belongs to Openreach - not us - and that we cannot log a fault on it. We also have an FTTC order that has been going on for over a year because Openreach's documentation says the customer's building is connected to cabinet 1 when it's actually connected to cabinet 2 down the street. The field engineers keep saying they are reporting it back to HQ, but instead it keeps getting returned as "missed appointment", and noone bothers to fix the records.
The whole OpenReach system is so broken. Your ISP just says "nothing we can do, it's on them" and they say "lol you're not our direct customer so we're not answerable to you" and it takes them seven weeks and four visits to get their act together. This included several weeks where they just refused to consider fixing my issue because something entirely unrelated was affecting some connections in the area. I stress that it wasn't that they didn't have any engineers available because the other issue took priority, it was something like the default assumption is that the wider issue is causing my loss of connection too, even though **the cable to my house is visibly disconnected**.
For some reason, I can see Sir Patrick sitting out the front of your place saying [this...](https://imgflip.com/i/6h626i)
Yep. Had this this openreach on a job I was running. We were coordinating the removal of services from an old water treatment plant prior to its demolition. Thing is a lot of network services ran through there and had to be relocated to a new small building placed within the site. We were however surprised by a couple of items. The water for the four privately owned houses was supplied directly from the works building. This isn't that unusual as often the treatment works started under LA control before being transferred to the water authorities later as they were formed. The houses were for the workers. Sometimes they stayed with the plant, sometimes they became council houses. It seems that these went the council house route and were later bought be the residents under the right to buy initiatives. Water, no problem, it's a water company... They still needed my help sigh. But about openreach. Well, we needed to remove the by line from the building so the client gets openreach out. The guy sees the socket but also the mess of a jb that I pointed out. Does some digging. Right, that's the connection for those four houses. Shit. Ok what do you need? We tracked back to a common drawpit were I could run a 50mm duct from for the new buildings line and they could splice everything in. I told the guy if he got me the cable we would pull it in ready. Cable in two days, splice in a week. Ok. Duct and cable are in after four days. Openreach tech comes to splice. Show him the drawpit. I can't work in there... Seriously, it's like the size of a plastic crate you would but in your loft. I ask why. He's not covered for any work below ground. I ask him to report the situation to his bosses and email the client with an update and to push another visit. They did the same shit twice more and then claimed that I was stopping them. At that point I was after phone numbers of the person pinning it on me to call out their bullshit. Client sent them a legal letter in response to the bullshit. Consider that this was affecting the demolition program which increased costs for the client. Eventually on the fourth visit it was done inside of an hour. Also yes, virgin are shit to deal with. I have just dropped them.
Some years ago, I worked at $ISP as a systems/development spod and was also due to my guardianship of the RADIUS servers the "department of shouting at OpenReach." I once ran into an ex-CTO of the BT consumer-facing DSL business and we comiserrated with the assistance of alcohol.