Friday 28th May 2010, 7.20am
I ran through what has become a daily routine; switch off the router and BT Vision box, make a mug of tea, have breakfast, switch everything on and watch it all come back up.
Then I try to load web-pages, run an FTP command and access BT’s own NNTP server. I also try to access BT Vision. All of these functions continue to fail.
I wait for the engineer’s arrival.
At 9.40am, I took a telephone call from a BT Openreach engineer who had a bunch of new information.
He said he wouldn’t be coming out, because the problem has been identified as an equipment issue in the local area.
Apparently, on Tuesday, BT Wholesale upgraded some of their hardware in the 01993 exchange. Since the upgrade was undertaken, more than 200 subscribers in the 01993 have been unable to access the internet.
The engineer said that BT Wholesale were aware of the problem, but until BT Wholesale correct the problem with their equipment, there was nothing that any of us – including the BT Openreach engineers – could do.
I decided to do the only thing that a sensible person in my position would do, I drove in to Abingdon to take Sophie out for lunch.
When I got home – about 2.30pm – I checked the internet.
It was working!
Instead of contacting the BT Broadband hell-desk, because, let’s face it, the quality, content and validity of the information they have exhibited, over the last four days, has been absolutely meaningless, I went to the bulletin board.
Yep, several people were reporting that they had a full range of internet services again.
So that’s it then.
Problem solved.
We’re all back online.
The thing is, as it appears to me, that as soon as the appropriate department of BT became aware that there was an issue in the 01993 exchange, the problem was corrected in less than four hours.
But it seems to have taken 72 hours for that critical piece of information to surface.
So the three questions that have to be asked are:
- why did it take 72 hours for the fault to be correctly identified?
- why were BTs offshore call-centre staff never aware of the true nature of the problem?
- why are BTs offshore hell-desk staff so hugely unhelpful and combative?
That’s BT – bunch of bastards. They will blaim everyone else on the planet for the problem because they don’t realise that the problem is being serruptitiously fixed by the engineers.
My conclusion with BT is: Engineers are highly competent. Support staff are highly incompetent, mainly because they don’t communicate with the engineers.
As an ex-BT engineer, I have to agree with Annie: we were all highly competent.
Honest.
I agree with you both. Once the BT Openreach engineers identified what the problem was, it was swiftly rectified, which makes my questions all the more pertinent.
There is a post from a customer on the BT bulletin board which says the BT call-centre staff told her that her browser was defective and she had to take it to a computer repair shop to get it fixed.
It’s not a good technology weekend in the Brennig household is it??