Sky Broadband and Openreach Make Dogs Dinner of Community Hall Fibre Upgrade

A Worcester-based community hall was left without a working broadband connection for several weeks after Sky Broadband and Openreach managed to mess up a copper to full fibre network upgrade. The process resulted in the wrong house getting the connection instead and confusion over whether the Hall was a commercial or residential property.

According to a local volunteer at the Christadelphian Hall on Saint George’s Lane, Dan Jones, the site is a commercial address and has long had a copper-based broadband connection (most recently via NOW Broadband (NOW TV)). But NOW recently informed the property managers that they could no longer renew their existing service and needed to upgrade to a full fibre (FTTP) connection via parent company Sky Broadband.

However, this appears to be where it all went wrong, as the community placed an order for a 500Mbps service with Sky and on the date of the “go live” the copper went off, but nothing else went on. “Turns out they had the address details wrong, they turned on an [Optical Network Terminal] somewhere else in Worcester (they suspected our neighbours, I jest you not),” said Dan to ISPreview.

At one point Sky even asked the property managers to check if their neighbour had “a small box next to the sofa that has a light on it“, which wasn’t possible as the individual concerned happened to be in hospital. Openreach later sent an engineer out who was able to confirm the address and what they already knew, that the Hall didn’t have an ONT.

The property managers then shared various utility bills and UPRN details to try and get the problem resolved, but that didn’t work either. At this point the community decided to put in a fresh broadband order with BT instead, but they couldn’t help and ending up making the situation even more confusing.

BT took the order, but an engineer never turned up and later, only after querying, were the community finally informed that this was because the installation had been organised by BT as a residential, rather than commercial, install by the provider and they couldn’t do it. BT then transferred Dan to another team to re-make the order for a commercial property, but they ended up making the same mistake again and placing it as residential.

A BT spokesperson said:

“We’re sorry the customer’s experience fell short of our usual standards. Residential and business services are set up differently and in this case, following a survey for full fibre, the property was identified as a business location.

This meant the residential order could not progress through to installation as expected. We recognise this resulted in repeated order cancellations and we are in direct contact with the customer to put things right. We have offered a goodwill gesture to compensate for the inconvenience caused.”

A Sky Broadband spokesperson said:

“We’re sorry for the disruption experienced by Mr Jones. The upgrade to full fibre was affected by an issue with the address which meant that the new service could not be set up.

We acknowledge the overall experience fell short of the standard we aim to provide. We have updated the account to ensure Mr Jones will not be charged a non-return fee for the hardware, the Subject Access Request is being actively progressed, and a gesture of goodwill was offered in recognition of the circumstances.”

In the end the community gave up trying with anything Openreach based and instead managed to get a full fibre connection installed via Zzoomm’s alternative broadband network, which went without a hitch. “I called Zzoomm and despite it not shown as a property they can service on their website, they pulled all the stops out and enabled an installation within 7 days of my call to them,” said Dan.

However, it appears as if part of the confusion may have arisen because the Hall had previously been provisioned with a residential broadband connection in the past. “It was amazing that the data at Openreach and their suppliers is so poor … the UPRN is commercial, always has been, they shouldn’t allow the order to be placed on a residential system nor should they have supplied residential services to it for years,” added Dan.

Credits to Worcester News for the ISP comments above.