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Friday 6 November 2009

View from an ISP on Special Faults Investigation.

Good article from Andrews and Arnold - an ISP view on SFI charges

http://www.aaisp.net.uk/kb-broadband-sfi-isp.html

I am also pretty fed up today having yet again fight against unfair high Openreach engineer costs that were not made clear to an end user with a PSTN fault.

Does anyone else wonder how strange it is sometimes when no fault is found, end user gets billed, not because it's his/her wiring or equipment but because no fault is found only then to find the fault mysteriously dissappears?

2 comments:

Cyberdoyle said...

they tried that with my dad. After weeks of problems and visits (one to mend the line which was broken) and calls to BT, ISP etc an engineer came and tested the line from inside the house. It tested fine, but no broadband. We had already swapped routers and knew the router was ok. We had done everything. Then 2 hours later the fault mysteriously repaired itself. Dad's ISP has refused to let them charge him. Not sure whether the ISP is absorbing the cost or not,but agree, it is very strange when everything at Dads was working fine, and the line was fine...
... the engineer did say he was going to have a look in the exchange...
er, who owns the exchange?

Cybersavvy UK said...

There's a much deeper problem here it seems to me.

As more and more PSTN faults develop as the network ages, the consumer cannot be held responsible, and charged.

Without a decent complaints procedure, where every problem from a consumer is logged and seen as part of a wider picture, whoever the ISP, this can only get worse.

I can report a fault to our ISP, as can my neighbour. We could, potentially, both be charged for engineer call outs, not knowing that there is a common problem. With no independent view of the isue, except that held by the network owner (BT in most instances), the consumer is constantly suffering.

If Ofcom has _any_ role it should be to monitor and deal with complaints such as these and creating an overall picture of the increasingly poor state of the PSTN.