I wasn't sure where to post this, but this section seemed as a good as any, for reasons that will become clear as you read on....
Not so long ago, being a BT retail phone customer I received a nice friendly email saying phone problems would now be fixed "a day quicker". After a bit of investigating it "seemed" that the fix target was being reduced from 3 to 2 working days. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I presumed that was a BTOR change being passed down through their "sister company".
As (bad) luck would have it last week my phone line went dead, no dial tone, no incoming calls and callers just heard normal ringing.
Didn't notice at first (well SWMBO had been told by someone who couldn't get an answer but didn't tell me!
) so finally reported it early on Wednesday morning. Was given a target fix of Friday 5pm.
(I won't bore you with the horrors of just trying to report a phone fault to BT, but I was NOT a happy bunny!
)
Broadband was still working so my first guess was a simple exchange issue.
Anyway BT fault analysis came back saying it was near my property (showing a picture highlighting a pole connected to a house). And BT told me they would send an engineer if I agreed that if the fault was due to damage in my property I would pay them some money.
No choice really, so I waited, and waited, and waited.....
Meanwhile broadband had been unreliable and I checked it; connected at well under half normal speeds
. So probably is a physical line issue...
After two working days (and a bit) just after lunch on Friday I contacted BT by online chat to ask why they had exceeded the fix target and what was going on. I had no updates despite supplying email and mobile contact details.
They said it was on schedule to be fixed and the target was 3 days anyway, not 2.
Hmmm. It looks like some at least of BT (retails) support staff aren't aware of the change. And the 2-day target seems to be "end of the second working day AFTER the fault is reported".
A couple of hours later I noticed the router resyncing and found a dial tone. Soon after a BT engineer rang on the landline to say it was fixed.
He was at the roadside cabinet which is about half way between me and the exchange. For a long time this was the ONLY non-FTTC cabinet on our exchange but was upgraded a few months ago.
I asked him what the problem was; he said broken wire, looked like it was damaged when new equipment/rack for FTTC was installed/connected. (That's my excuse for posting it here
).
(I subsequently had another battle over several days to get my profile at PlusNet sorted out. The BT IP profile reset immediately but PN kept throttling me and their support people were clueless despite me being very specific about the problem)
Back on topic. So what do we think the target fix window actually is for BTOR? And has anyone else suffered from fibre installs messing up innocent bystanders on other lines?