Time for another update on our quest for FTTP – in 9 days it will be a five month anniversary of the start of this saga, and no light at the end of this tunnel. Here is what has happened since my last post in May.

Following the no-show on May 28, I wrote a long complain to OFCOM, not to fix my specific case (for that is not what OFCOM do), but to look into BT/OpenReach abuse of their dominant market position, and OpenReach’s standards of communication.

I got a response from OFCOM on 5 June (ref no. 02007378), informing me they do not engage in individual cases, and don’t deal with OpenReach, since it is not ‘customer facing’. It was fairly obvious that the person responding didn’t bother to read properly through my complaint, for I did not ask for an intervention in my individual case.

More importantly, there is, IMHO, a compelling case that OpenReach are de facto customer facing since they hold and handle my personal information, communicate directly with me, make appointments to visit, etc. As such they need to be held accountable by someone. This is the heart of the problem, the BT/OpenReach split is nominal and pretty meaningless, but allows BT to gate keep access to OpenReach, which prevents accountability of any sort). I asked OFCOM to read-read the original complaint, but haven’t heard back.

I also queried the no show situation with my ISP, who informed me that an update from OpenReach stated:

Engineer visited the site and stated that Network solution is required to complete the job and there are some other engineering issue as well. Now the team will contact EU to visit the the site and complete the work . I request you to wait for some time and review back on 05/06/2025.”

When I received no update, I prodded my ISP again on 6 June (I think the guy dealing with my case was off work, but I am beginning to lose patience with A&A as well, they are not giving this the attention it requires):

I have passed this to my manager to look into raising a higher level escalation, this is the highest level we can go to but we have to go through a process first or it is rejected, I believe we have done this so should be accepted, we will get back to you asap

And then again on 13 June (no response), and 18 June, again no response, but I received another call from OpenReach the same day to make an appointment for an engineer to visit to (yet again) install the ONT (which was already installed on 20 May). An appointment was made for 23 June, with OpenReach again insisting I’d have to be present, even though the work at the property is all completed.

Well, this time the engineer actually turned up, informed me that whatever big problem there was previously was sorted, and he should be able to get me connected by the end of the day. That was the last I saw of him.

The one thing different this time around was I was given a link to ‘My Engineer’ online tracker, so when I didn’t hear anything by the end of the day, and the ONT was still showing a fault, I went to see if it would tell me anything useful, where I learnt:

Unfortunately the engineer has been unable to complete the job. Please contact your service provider.

Which I duly did the same day, and their response informed me that

The engineer notes state that “ I cannot complete this task be cause further work is required by the Dig and Aux control team for duct work or a new lead-in” We are taking this up with Openreach and will let you know when they have been able to resolve this.

As has now become the norm, nothing more has happened, so I prodded my ISP again on 3 July and been told they have escalated to a higher level in BT.

Nothing again, so prodded them again yesterday, 9 July, which produced the following response from OpenReach:

“Due to complex work being required for external work on this order hence there is a current delay in completing the works. A request will has been sent to openreach CE ( chief engineers ) team to prioritize the allocation of openreach engineer to complete the external work on this order at earliest possible to further progress and complete the order for customer. Therefore currently openreach escalation team is awaiting for response from openreach CE on the latest of the order to further progress and complete the order for customer accordingly at earliest possible. What are the next steps- Therefore we will review this order back on 10/07/2025 at 13:00 hours for further updates”

I am of two minds if this is human or AI produced, but that aside, I am not particularly hopeful, for if you have followed this saga from the start, you might recall that on 26 March I was informed by OpenReach:

“This order has been escalated to the Chief Engineer teams, who are scheduled to attend within the next 5 working days to assist in resolving the issue. The order has been referred to this team as part of the Uber Complex Chief Engineer trial. Chief Engineers will manage the orders until the customer is in service. (Emphasis mine.)

Also, I know, thanks to the ‘indiscretion’ of the external contractor who did the ONT install (20 May), that these issues had been identified during the original site survey on 22 March and are logged in the engineering notes …

I am not the only one in this boat. A neighbour two doors down from me is a few weeks behind me in this process, but being given the same run around as ourselves. Their ISP is Sky, and I have a very strong suspicion that had we been with BT, our FTTP would been up and running back in March.

I am unsure what to do next. I have contemplated making a complain against BT to ASA for false advertising, and to Trading Standards for mis-selling, but I suspect it would not get me anywhere further either. Perhaps it’s time to write to one of those consumer columns in national newspaper.