I am seemingly stuck in the 1970s – unable to get a working phone line/broadband from BT. When my broadband failed in mid June, Openreach engineers traced the fault to the local cabinet. After a great deal of tooing and froing BT says it can’t be repaired and the cabinet is at 100% capacity and nothing can be done to restore my broadband for a month. It seems the only way I will be connected is if someone in that cabinet cancels and a space becomes available.
BT has provided me with a 4G hotspot device which provides limited wifi but it’s not reliable enough to stream video or download anything significant. I’d switch to Virgin Media, but it’s not offered in our street. I could almost understand it if I lived in a remote spot but this is London in 2019.
SB, Streatham, south London
Older readers will remember long waits to get a new telephone line installed and, incredibly, we appear to have gone back in time. Your letter suggests that the broadband system is running at full capacity in some places. This is not the first letter like this that we have had. You were particularly frustrated because each of the four engineers who arrived to examine the problem had no knowledge of what their colleagues had done before. Happily, a call to Openreach HQ managed to get things moving. The cabinet has been enlarged and you have been reconnected.
Openreach has apologised to you for giving the “wrong advice” which led to the delay in resolving the issue. It says it maintains over 100,000 street cabinets across the network and these kinds of faults are “extremely rare”.
Since April if the service stops working and is not fully fixed after two working days, customers are entitled to £8 a day in compensation. BT will be paying you this.
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