UPDATE BT Openreach Engineer Woes Return as Bad Weather Hits UK

BTOpenreach, which manages access to and maintains BT’s national UK phone and broadband network, looks set to suffer worsening delays to the provision of new services after the recent spate of “extremely high rainfall and some flooding” forced the group to re-focus its telecoms engineers on repair work.

Officially Openreach has had to re-declare a status of Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control (MBORC) across a significant chunk of the United Kingdom, which references regions where serious damage to their network can slow lead times while repairs take priority. Openreach only cleared its previous MBORC status two weeks ago.

Openreach Status Update (30th November 2012)

It will probably come as little surprise that due to the recent severe weather conditions witnessed in many parts of the UK, Openreach, with regret, will declare MBORC for repair activities on the following 11 areas with effect from 14:00 today 30th November 2012:-

Coventry
Derby/Nottingham
Exeter
Humber
Newport/Worcester
North Wales
Stoke/Chester
Swansea
Swindon
Taunton
Truro

In these areas, we have seen extremely high rainfall and some flooding that has severely restricted access to our network apparatus and our underground infrastructure that is heavily impacted.

We are directing available resource into these areas to bring the position back to normality as quickly as possible.

We are closely monitoring these recovery actions and will remove MBORC as soon as service can be restored to the levels they were at immediately before the recent poor weather.

Finally, we would like to thank our customers for their patience during this very difficult time.

The move, while completely understandable, is likely to result in frustration for ISPs. Many providers are already having to cope with a growing number of unhappy customers, some of which have had to wait months to get a new service installed.

UPDATE 4th December 2012

The Independent Office of the Telecommunications Adjudicator (OTA2) latest monthly report confirms that “the recent extreme weather conditions experienced around the UK over the last 2 weeks has driven a 3-fold increase in repair faults relative to what Openreach would normally expect at this time of the year“.

On top of that Openreach’s Plan & Build performance has “deteriorated in the last 2 months due to external supply chain issues“, which are being “urgently tackled” by Openreach senior management. A recovery plan is said to be underway, which should normalise performance by end of the year.