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[Black Sheep]

LOL at the film reference .... love a bit of NW, I do !!

I'll be honest with you bb, I'm also confbabbled about what's going on with your install ?? I don't have much of a defence, other than with the sheer size of our company and the plethora of different reporting systems we have ( and actually need), then mis-information creep can, and obviously does appear.

This is in no way aimed at your goodself at all, but everybody's a football manager when their team aren't performing, the same on these forums ... if it was as easy as 'they' make it out to be, then why TF haven't the industry leaders A) thought about it and implemented it, and B) gone head-hunting Barry off Facebook for his immense insight. 

I currently have a variety of systems in use, to try and bottom an issue out on our rural build ... CSS(routing & records platform), ORION ( FTTP survey tool), Land registry, Wayleaves register, Geo-Hub (network plant locator), Artisan (plant defect register), National Repository (all information for each individual PON being built), LUMS (project recording tool for anything at all fibre related) ..... this is just for one single query holding up a build.

Sometimes, these platforms aren't just the sole possession of OR, they may be shared or owned by a 3rd party. Point I'm labouring to make, when you're building FTTP as quick as we are ... one or two issues are part of the journey. I just wish the other hundreds of thousands, nay millions of customers, who haven't had an issue would report back so on here. Not sure Kitz would be as happy about it though. 

If you are one of the unlucky ones, then we have our escalation procedure you can follow if you so choose .... try that with Ryanair and see how far you get, there isn't anything to escalate to .... so I do absolutely understand your frustration, I absolutely do, I'm just hoping to get across the flip-side of the issue. Not for sympathy or anything like that, just a modicum of understanding.

Then kick off again .... 

[bbnovice]

Thanks for that Black Sheep.

I have gone way past being angry or frustrated - I have a good FTTC connection so I am not desperate for FTTP. I only ordered it because BT offered it to me and I would be silly to turn down a free regrade which should give me over double the speed. And hopefully be more reliable.

I totally accept that OR completes thousands of jobs every day OK without any drama or problems. I'm only reporting on this because it seems to me (looking in from the outside) that OR process engineering appears deficient and exceptions handled by simply repeating of the same step - usually using a different engineer. When things do go wrong they can go really wrong.

In another life I was a Programme Manager responsible for the design and implementation of large scale customer facing service processes. One of the criteria I was judged on was how resilient the processes and systems were, and their ability to handle the inevitable problems when they occured. And as we all know they WILL occur.

I suspect that OR internal processes may be a many headed monster as they have probably just been added to over the years rather than being fundamentally rethought as the business evolves. Different computer systems typically begin to proliferate to deal with different products and business requirements and the issue then becomes stitching them together and the compromises that entails. I could bore on this subject for hours.

In the meantime BT Complaints were meant to phone at a pre arranged time today to check on status, but so far they have failed to do so,
                     

[bbnovice]

Newest update:

BT Complaints contacted me today to say:

OR accept that the external tasks have not been completed although it appears to have been signed off as such.

OR have therefore promised BT to send yet another crew before Friday 13th (auspicious date!) to complete the outstanding external work, namely pulling the fibre external to the premise.

BT will phone me on the 16th to check all OK before OR turn up to complete the order (installation inside the premise) on the appointed date of 17 November. (The current revised date - the date in January 2021 has now disappeared).

On the BT order tracker there is another task entitled work outside the premise which was completed on 4 November. Not quite sure what that could be, but I'll  let that one go.   

I'm almost getting excited!

[j0hn]

On the BT order tracker there is another task entitled work outside the premise which was completed on 4 November.

The external work is pulling fibre from the chamber to the external wall of your property.
They don't enter the property to do this and you don't need to be present.
They fit an external CSP (customer splice point) on the external of the property, where the feed will enter the property.
Some people like to be there to choose where the CSP will go.

On activation day an OpenReach engineer attends with the ONT and does the final bit of fibre from the ONT to the CSP.

Some installs still use an older deployment method where this external work isn't needed and the fibre is pulled directly from the chamber right to the ONT in a single continuous length with no CSP.

My install was the older, no CSP method.
For my install the external work involved OpenReach pulling the fibre through my duct and leaving a large coil of fibre where it appeared from the duct at my external wall.
The internal work on install day was pulling it through in to the house and connecting the ONT.
With the older method sometimes a single engineer does both bits at once on his own.

Do you know if you are having a CSP fitted?

[Ronski]

I'm pretty sure he said that they'd need access through locked gates to fit the CSP.

[j0hn]

Ah.

Reading the post again i see...

OR accept that the external tasks have not been completed although it appears to have been signed off as such.

OR have therefore promised BT to send yet another crew before Friday 13th (auspicious date!) to complete the outstanding external work, namely pulling the fibre external to the premise.

and

On the BT order tracker there is another task entitled work outside the premise which was completed on 4 November. Not quite sure what that could be, but I'll  let that one go.

These are the same thing.

The "work outside the premises" that's marked as complete is the external work that you mention before it, the pulling the fibre to the external of the property.

As you say they have already accepted this work isn't complete then all should be ok.

Just double check with BT that you will be contacted when this work is being done.
It is often completed without contacting the home owner as it is all external but clearly that can't happen with a locked gate.

[bbnovice]

Just double check with BT that you will be contacted when this work is being done.
It is often completed without contacting the home owner as it is all external but clearly that can't happen with a locked gate.

BT are aware that access is via locked security gates and OR have been told this several times by BT and my contact details passed over to them. I have also personally amended authorisations sent directly to me by OR (eg for digging on customer property to clear the duct) pointing out the access issue and that they needed to advise me when they plan to arrive. Despite that I have never ever been contacted in advance by OR. Luckily I'm retired so have always been around when they have arrived unexpectedly otherwise this thread would be even longer!

In discussion with the BT guy this morning he said he had never encountered such an error strewn order before which seems to have broken down at every step.

With a bit of luck this will all be fixed by next Tuesday lunch time and I will be able to report success! But Lord knows how much this "free" FTTP regrade has cost BT and/or OR.       

[Ronski]

When I had Virgin installed I had asked them to get the first engineer doing the external install to phone, they assured me this would happen, I knew it almost certainly wouldn't. So I printed off a diagram of where I'd already prepared a trench and wanted the CS, explained the situation and put my phone number on there. The engineer arrived, screwed the box to the front of the porch then opened the Toby and found my piece of paper, luckily he did phone me and waited the 20 minutes whilst I drove home. He was actually very pleased as my preparation had made the job easy, and now my connection point is on the side of the house the other side of the hedge and locked gate. We also got lucky when the workmen installed the Toby, originally it was marked out the wrong side of the front path, but my wife spotted them and managed to get them to put it the other side of the path.

I've got this to all go through again when FTTP is installed, as ours is not overhead either, whats the chances of managing to get that where I need it 

[Weaver]

There does seem to be something wrong with the way OR engineers get hold of or use/don’t use end user contact details. My ISP has correct contact details for my wife including her mobile number and instructions to only call that. My four DSL lines have no telephone service, not just no phones connected, so there’s absolutely no point phoning those numbers, yet OR engineers keep on calling these useless numbers to let us know they’re coming. They just either always call the line they’re working on, which is daft, or else somehow the correct contact details aren’t propagating through to them. So either limited thinking or lack of joined-upness. No reason to suggest that it’s the OR engineers’ fault.

[Black Sheep]

For info .... there is no 'thinking' necessary when an engineer picks up a task on his mobile phone.

The EU information that the ISP has provided, is in very simple format ... ie: name, address, contact number (usually the faulty tel. number being reported), secondary contact number if different from the reported number (as in a mobile or a neighbours etc), any security passwords to gain access, etc etc ..... it is the ISP that provide this info, not OR.

OR are responsible for the other information such as previous visits (Repeat reports), early life failures, routing from Exchange to premises, estimated completion times, etc etc ....

I lost count many years ago, of the number of times the EU has explicitly requested they be contacted on a specific number, only for the ISP call handler to miss the info off when building the task.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Is this ALL the information an ISP is able to pass on, as that would explain a lot.

When my E-side got accidentally routed to someone else and my D side left flapping in the breeze, it took far longer than it should have as while my ISP knew what had happened (they tried calling my number and got someone else), this was never passed on to the engineers who were sent.

It only got resolved when they eventually sent a voice engineer with no information at all so he actually came to the house, when all of this could have been solved on the first visit had the ISP notes been passed on.   In my case it was even more tragic as the CEO of Origin Broadband was chasing this up himself, to no avail.

Granted, I think the automated systems to pass information have changed a lot since then, but its distressing to hear the same mistakes being made despite that.  Sure there will be cases where an ISP do not pass the information on correctly, but past experience suggests there are also cases where they do and its not passed on to the engineers.

[Weaver]

@Black_Sheep Understood. As I said, I didn’t have any assumptions. Since however my ISP A&A has no DSL lines with any telephone service, every one being internet-only, I will be surprised if they are filling in the to-be-worked-on line phone number instead of the contact number they have on record for me. I just checked that they have the right contact details recorded for each of my lines. I’ll email them about it.

[Weaver]

I asked AA about this and they swear that they are doing the right thing, and I have checked that their contact details for me are correct and can see that they’re recorded properly at their end. So who knows. At AA’s end I would hope that there’s not too much manual error-prone human intervention required in copying details from the user’s account (per-line details, that is) and just hitting a button to create a new callout visit request. But I have no idea exactly how it works.

Apologies to the OP for veering off-topic.

[bbnovice]

Hopefully this will be my final report on the tale of the FTTP upgrade that seemed to go wrong at every opportunity.

Today I have a working 150/30 FTTP connection! The order was originally placed on 4 September, and has been the subject of a formal complaint made to BT on 25 September.

The latest situation was that OR promised BT they would pull the fibre by 13 November at the very latest, and complete the installation inside the premise on 17 November.
OR were a no show on the 13th so I was expecting another round of shadow boxing with BT if the OR engineer arrived today and found that the fibre had not been pulled and then left. (This was meant to be a 2 stage install).

This morning a lone OR engineer arrived at 8 am sharp. He told me had chosen my job first as it had a big red mark next to it - so he was expecting trouble! I explained the situation about the fibre but he went off to make an inspection of the duct runs and connection points to see if he could pull the fibre himself.

When he came back he reported that he thought that it might be possible to pull the cable himself despite the length of the run and that it there are quite a few bends in it. However he did find that the physical line identifiers at the connection point did not make sense and belonged to lines already active in the network a fair distance away geographically. Also there are 15 houses in the street but only a maximum of 8 ports are available at the connection point. I am the first FTTP installation in the street so this was all a bit of a worry and it looks like OR may have discussions with the sub-contractors who actually deployed the network. Once the physical line ids had been correctly identified he then managed to pull the fibre through the duct unaided.

The rest of the installation then went smoothly but was a bit different from what I had expected.  A grey box was positioned immediately above the end of the duct next to the house, and both the fibre and the copper cable were run into it. From that box the new fibre cable run was tacked to the wall and follows the copper cable, and thence straight through the wall and into the house. The odd thing is that the external fibre cable is black but where it emerges through the wall inside the house it is white. How does that happen?
Finally the fibre was lit and a connection quickly established. The BT order was for a 150/30Mbs service, and 143/30Mbs was actually achieved from the off.

So I am now happy despite this upgrade taking nearly 3 months to complete. I reviewed the OR visits and counted that 10 OR engineers have visited the site at one time or another, plus the mystery phantom engineer(s) who allegedly pulled the fibre in early November and reported the job as being complete! I'm pleased to report that the OR engineer today knew what he was doing, stuck with it and completed the job although I think it took a lot more time (over 3 hours) than he had anticipated. 
     
BT Complaints phoned later to see if I was satisfied. I was told that the history of this complaint will be retained by BT for future training purposes!

I'm sure most installations will go smoothly but my expereince illustrates that when it it does go wrong, it can go wrong big time.

[Weaver]

That’s probably the limitation of TCP showing in the reduced figure; 2.67% of the throughput is overhead because of IPv4+TCP headers (worse if IPv6) anyway. Might get the full speed with multiple TCP streams running in parallel. Timestamps add yet more overhead but might speed things up.