BT Openreach UK Engineers Face More Delays After Week of Flooding

BTOpenreach, which manages access to BT’s national UK telecoms network, has warned customers to expect yet more engineer delays with their broadband and phone services after a week of high winds and heavy flooding exasperated the existing problem and forced them to focus even more effort upon repairs.

The situation follows on from our report last month, which revealed that similar conditions experienced during the early summer period had resulted in some customers being left to wait for two months before being able to get a new service installed (here). At the time BT warned that lead times were expected to remain higher “for some months to come“. Meanwhile winter is yet to arrive and autumn has only just begun.

Sadly the latest spate of bad weather has forced Openreach to extend its Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control (MBORC) status, which references areas where serious damage to their network could and probably will affect their services and slow lead times for new provisions as repairs once again take priority.

UK Areas Currently Affected by Openreach’s MBORC

Durham & Tees Valley
York
Bradford & the Dales
Leeds & West Yorkshire
South Yorkshire and Chesterfield
North Lincoln
Cumbria
North Manchester
South Manchester
Merseyside
Lancashire
Derby & Nottingham
Leicester
Birmingham & Black Country
Mid Wales & Shrewsbury
North Wales
Stoke & Chester
NE Scotland
Central Scotland
SE Scotland
Aylesbury
Northampton
Southampton

Openreach expects some better weather this week and thus remains “hopeful of making a swift recovery“, which somewhat depends upon their definition of “swift“. This situation will of course vary from region to region.