Dissatisfaction with BT engineer visits and the costs that can be incurred are nothing new (see here). Rarely does a week go by without somebody somewhere complaining of an unfair charge or similar annoyance. The good news is that BT has proposed a new Special Faults Investigation 2 (SFI2) service to put right a few of these wrongs; the bad news is that some ISPs suggest it could do the opposite.

Officially BT are supposed to have responsibility for every part of your phone line within their realm, which is essentially everything up to where that line enters a buildings phone socket. So if something goes wrong within their realm then you shouldn't have to pay but if it goes wrong within the end-users realm then that’s on you, via an SFI. Fair enough.


Sadly a lot of customers have found themselves being charged for work that should not carry a cost. One quick glance at the comments in this BBC Watchdog Blog from October 2009 highlights the issue quite well. Similarly ISPs often privately confide in us about how much effort they have to put into appealing charges, such as when an engineer has not turned up but still bills for an abortive visit, despite the customer waiting in all day.

In fairness the majority of BT engineers do not charge for illegitimate reasons and some even try to avoid making charges where one should have perhaps been raised; it’s not an entirely engineer specific problem. In any case it’s not too tough to find people who have had a bad experience.

The forthcoming SFI2 has thus been designed with feedback from unbundled (LLU) providers and is primarily focused towards tackling LLU ISP issues. SFI2 appears to be modular and has the option not to include the end user realm work, among other benefits.


On the face of it this is great news but underneath the surface resides a nasty new call-out charge for "right when tested", as first reported last week by Thinkbroadband. The move has caused a lot of anger among some ISPs because it is perceived as BT effectively charging for work that is entirely within its own sphere to resolve.


SFI2 is unlikely to prevent BT and ISPs reaching an impasse on faults; the ISP says there is a BT fault and BT say there is not before pushing for an SFI and thus the risk of further charges. Some ISPs also insist that even when they can prove a fault on BT's infrastructure, BT do not believe them and still push towards the risk of an SFI charge.

Naturally ISPs cannot simply absorb such costly things and so it must be passed onto the customer, which adds an extra level of trauma to both the end-user and the ISP who has to deal with any inevitable complaints. So from the consumer perspective it's a simple concern that broadband users who suffer problems on their line could now face even bigger bills for fixing problems, perhaps without the fault itself even being resolved.



The sheer complexity of BT's fault reporting system is no fun to be writing about and researching at the weekend, we can assure you of that. Indeed if you managed to read this far then give yourselves and big pat on the back, you've earned it. We can only hope that SFI2 will turn out to be better than the concerns suggest but in practice ISPs expect a few improvements but fear higher costs.