BT Openreach UK Engineer Fails to Find London’s National Gallery

It’s well known that BTOpenreach engineers sometimes have difficulty finding the UK homes and businesses of their intended customers, yet some targets are quite hard to miss, such as London’s National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. But miss it they did.

According to Adrian Kennard, the Director of broadband provider AAISP (Andrews & Arnold), an Openreach engineer was recently dispatched to a wing of The National Gallery where a customer was reportedly having trouble with one of their three bonded broadband lines.

Kennard told ISPreview.co.uk, “Fault requests in to BT do not include any address – just the phone number. BT are expected to be able to find the line they originally installed.” Kennard added that the operators “gold address reference” for the line install did include the name of the wing.

Adrian Kennard explained:

“To add to the fun, this was for a fault visit, i.e. where BT are visiting the place they installed a phone line previously. It is not a case where we tell them where to go for a new install, and so we could have made a mistake, it is a matter of them going where they put the phone line in order to fix it!“

As Kennard alludes above, this is a line that BT have had to fix before (one year ago) and the gallery has not moved since, in fact it hasn’t moved since it was founded in 1824 (unless you count a few tiny geological changes) 🙂 . Openreach’s related notes also suggest that they could potentially charge AAISP an “abortive visit” fee, yes, you know, for not being able to find the National Gallery. “I’d say the place is hard to miss!,” added Adrian.

So, if ever an Openreach engineer fails to find your home and possibly even threatens to charge you for it (this does sometimes happen) then, tongue firmly in cheek, remember that you too now have something in common with one of London’s largest and most historic buildings. As usual we’ve shot off a message to Openreach in order to get their side of the story and will report back if they reply.

UPDATE 10:23am

Openreach have chosen not to comment.