Oops BT Tries to Charge ISP GBP25K for Fixing a Broadband Line

As mistake go, this could be a comical whopper. BTOpenreach has handed Internet provider Andrews & Arnold (AAISP) a staggering bill of £25,200 and all for fixing a single customer’s faulty Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) broadband line.

It’s fair to say that incorrect charges from Openreach are a more common occurrence in this industry than some ISPs would like. In theory Openreach shouldn’t charge for fixing faults when they’re found to be within their own realm, although in practice mistakes are often made and this can result in end-users and ISPs having to dispute the bills.

In this instance one of AAISP’s customers appeared to be suffering from a faulty FTTC “fibre broadband” line, which would drop its connection several times a day. The ISP had tried everything it could, such as replacing all of the equipment and connecting directly into the MasterSocket’s test port (ruling out extension wiring and some other common causes), but the problem continued.

At this point the fault looked more and more likely to be within Openreach’s realm and the operators own test report appeared to agree: “Impairment in copper joint detected, most likely in local network. Please continue to submit a trouble report.”

BT then asked the ISP to “arrange an appointment” and the provider duly booked an engineer, but this is where it starts to get interesting. The line went off for an hour or so and when it returned the fault had been fixed, excellent job, except for the bill.

Adrian Kennard, Director of Andrews & Arnold, said:

“To our surprise we now have a bill from BT for “Time Related Charges” for this fault report, as BT had closed it as “Customers Equipment, Error or Misoperation;Fault found on customer sited non BT maintained equipment”. Somewhat odd as BT’s own tests said to report a fault, and we had not approved any “Time Related Charges”, and we had already eliminated all customer equipment (the same equipment still in use and working). In fact it was BT who asked us to report a fault and BT who asked us for an appointment. They took this upon themselves all the way.

This is, in itself, typical of the hassle we have every day from BT. Except this time BT have charged for 350 hours of time related charges on the fault (the entire fault report end to end was only 7 days (168 hours), most of which was waiting for BT to actually go out and do something. From point of no return at start of day, to closed job, was under 7 hours. They would have had to have had 50 engineers working for that whole 7 hour period to justify this charge!“

The charge itself.. an excitable £25,200.00! Yes that’s £25k to fix one ordinary FTTC line and for roughly the same money the customer could have had a Gigabit capable leased line with dedicated Ethernet capacity installed right to their property.

This is almost certainly a terribly embarrassing mistake on Openreach’s part, although it’s perhaps indicative of an all too familiar trend for some ISPs. We have asked Openreach to comment and are awaiting their reply. Normally TRCs would be agreed with the ISP beforehand and we suspect they wouldn’t have agreed a bill of £25k.