BT Forces UK ISPs to Charge More for SFI2 Broadband Engineer Visits

The base module price of having your ISP call out a BTOpenreach engineer to investigate and potentially fix a broadband fault (Special Faults Investigation 2) on your ADSL telephone line (i.e. IPstream Connect) will increase from £95 +vat to £125 +vat next month.

BTWholesale usually picks up the tab for any problems that occur on your phone line and which exist within their “realm” (i.e. this usually means everything up to where the line enters your home phone socket), yet anything outside of that is typically charged to you (i.e. within the end-users realm).

For example, BT will often levy an SFI2 charge against a customer if the fault is found on non-BT wiring in your home or is linked to your broadband modem or router. In practice this aspect still causes disputes but that’s another story and one we’ve covered several times before (here).

The new change, which is effective from 1st September 2012, means that BT’s primary SFI2 base charge will increase. However they have also reduced the price of other work that may or may not be needed.

BTWholesale SFI2 Prices from 1st September 2012 (+vat)
Base Module – £125 (Previously £95)
Wiring Module – £40 (Previously £50)
Equipment Module – £20 (Previously £50)
Co-op Module – £20 (Previously £35)

It’s worth pointing out that some ISPs might also choose to take the older SFI (aka – SFI1) service, which remains unchanged and carries a single cost of £160. Likewise when a BTOpenreach engineer is unable to gain access to your property at an agreed time/date then a further £85 abortive fault or £98 abortive installation charge may be levied (we still get occasional reports of this being charged even when the customer has been waiting in all day and nobody has turned up).

Given the high costs it’s easy to see why ISPs continue to hope for an alternative to BTOpenreach as the only source for telephone line fault fixing.