Kellys & Quinns are Contractors
They were used a lot by BT for some of the so called more simple jobs particularly FTTC installs. BT pays the Kelly/Quinn and they in turn pay their engineers a pittance. You'd sigh with relief if you got a proper Openreach engineer and pray that it wasnt one of the contractors.
I myself had a bad install with Quinns. Ironically I'd spent the previous day drilling holes and setting everything up for the installation (which was ordered as a paid for NTE shift), but he refused to do this saying it wasnt in his remit and instead backwired 20m over normal phone cable and converted what was an old LJU2 into a 'new' NTE which really wasnt. Because Id done all the ground work, it was only when he'd gone an I was putting a drawer back in place that I realised he'd put the SSFP so that I couldn't open the drawer properly. The SSFP was in a totally useless place and impractical for location for the modem.
He didn't have any proper tools and had to scrat around in his van to find a faceplate for my old NTE and even tried to nick my clarity NTE faceplate and would have done if I hadn't seen him try to walk off with it. I complained to Plusnet because I'd specifically told them I needed a master socket shift because there was no power at site of the original NTE... who confirmed that it had been processed as such and that he should have done so. So... they had to call out Openreach to do a proper job.
Openreach engineer arrived, took one look at the impractical layout, rolled his eyes and started to do a proper NTE shift. His face when he saw the back wire job was something else. No word of a lie this is a direct quote taken from my log:
27 July 2013 11:17·
/snip/ this definitely needs sorting and Im afraid Im going to have to report what the contractor has done. VDSL should not have been provisioned like this
A very large portion of their work needed re-doing again by Openreach. They're not used as much these days - no need most are now home installs and there's not so much the boom that there was in 2013/2014, but they are still around.
TBH I dont much blame the contractors themselves. They are paid a pittance per job, dont get proper training or tools and our often out of pocket with van expenses & travelling. To make a living wage they had to do more jobs per day than OR engineers and because they were paid per job they wanted to be in and out asap (hence why he wouldnt do the master socket relocate).
