So, two days ago, the Uber Complex Chief Engineer, that mythical OpenReach beast I have started to doubt existed, turned up on my doorstep: ‘I gather, from the 5000 notes on this job, you are having a spot of bother?’

‘You think!? Five months this has been dragging on.’

All in all, he seemed like a decent guy, apologetic for the unspeakable mess, and for the total lack of meaningful communication — I was hopeful today might have been the day our FTTP would finally come online.

Alas, it wasn’t to be. He reappeared a few hours later, after poking around the BT junction boxes in the vicinity of the house, bearing bad news. But he did manage to work out what the problem was, and it is beyond belief:

It would seem that our connection from the exchange has been routed to a box on the opposite side of the road from the house, whereas the physical connection from the house has been made to the box on our side of the street (one that is virtually in front our door).

As far as I understand, the routing has been a deliberate choice, but I guess the dig crew didn’t bother reading the notes, after all there is a box just in front of the house, so that’s clearly where it’s meant to go, and it only meant digging a small hole in the pavement rather than closing the road.

To make this even more mind boggling, the only reason this has, finally, come to light, is because there is currently only one connection on that other box, and the cable is of a different shape than the one that leaves our house! (The cable is from the one guy on this street that has a working FTTP, and, who, naturally, is on the other side of the road from us.)

I guess the idea that the cable ends should be tagged hasn’t crossed anyone’s mind at OpenReach … I am counting my blessings, imagine there were half a dozen connections there already.

Armed with that piece of information, the notes left by the previous engineer (23 June) make more sense — it would appear that guy too worked out what the problem was, but didn’t document this adequately, and his ‘fix’ was to punt things back to the Dig team to take the lead across the road.

The Uber Complex Chief Engineer has had the (possibly) smarter idea of requesting that the connection be re-routed from the exchange to the correct side of the road. This takes 48h to do, though I have learnt by now that with OpenReach the count only starts the day after such a request is made, so that would be 72h for a normal person. After which, perhaps, the connection can be finally fixed.

To say I am quietly optimistic that we have reached a turning point in this saga would, on past experience, be utter folly, and, TBH, I’d not be surprised should they change their mind and decide to dig across the road instead. But I got the UCCE’s phone number, so now I at least have someone at the sharp end of things I can bother out this; and that I will start doing from Monday.