BT Issues Weather Warning for its UK Phone and Broadband Network

BTOpenreach has officially declared a status of Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control (MBORC) in the areas worst affected by recent bad weather and flooding, which has resulted in serious delays to related telecoms repair and upgrade work across the United Kingdom.

Apparently the currently affected areas include Canterbury, Tunbridge Wells, Brighton, Portsmouth, Esher, Croydon, Crayford, Southend, Ipswich, Broadlands, Luton and the Lea Valley. However, BT notes that any delays to their performance should still remain “well inside our agreed 14 day lead times“.

BTOpenreachs Statement

With 40 flood warnings and a further 152 flood alerts in place across the UK yesterday, as you would expect this is having a significant impact on repair lead times. This has been a particular problem in the South of England which had initially been hit hardest by the rain, but recent days have seen the North being impacted too.

Having monitored the weather closely, we had expected, and therefore planned for, high repair demand this week, and so broadly this increase is in line with our forecast and plan.

We are doing our best to meet all challenges. However, in some areas the levels of faults have more than doubled and as such we will need to declare MBORC (Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control) for all repair activities in 12 of our 73 SOM (Senior Operations Manager) patches.

BT hopes to bring the repair stack back to more normal levels by the weekend of Friday 11th May 2012 next week, assuming the weather doesn’t get worse and that’s always a possibility.