Monday was the three months anniversary of the start of this ongoing saga. Yesterday, an external contractor turned up to install the ONT (the wee box inside the house). He was pleasant enough, got the work done, and then informed me there was a fault on the line 3km from the house that someone else would need to fix, adding that the paperwork shows that OpenReach have been aware of since their initial inspection on 22 March.

So yeah, three months to carry out less than a day’s work (I reckon all in all, about 5h of work involved), and a broken line a the end of that. No timeline on when they will get to fixing it either (‘someone will be in touch soon’: the last OpenReach text message that said that, nothing happened for over a month).

All this reminded be painfully why we ditched the shoddy BT operation nine years ago. Back then the ADSL line was dropping connection at least once an hour, there were numerous routing problems that got in the way of my work, and totally hopeless level of customer support by people who didn’t have a clue, just some sort of a hopeless script. At a friend’s recommendation we switched over to Andrews and Arnold, arguably the best ISP in the UK, and never looked back.

So yeah, frustrating as it is, I should not be surprised, given that OpenReach is just a BT rebrand of sorts. The worst thing in all of this is that there is no comeback against the shocking standard of service, because they are a wholesaler, so their relationship is with the ISP, not ourselves, and hence OFCOM doesn’t care.