Openreach Falls Behind on Ofcom UK Quality of Service Targets UPDATE

The UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has today opened an investigation into the Quality of Service (i.e. minimum standards for repairs and new line provision) targets that they impose upon some of Openreach’s (BT) broadband and Ethernet products, which comes after the regulator found that the operator had fallen short in several areas.

As an operator with Significant Market Power (SMP), the regulator requires Openreach to meet specified QoS performance standards across the leased lines access and wholesale local access markets. But the network access provider recently informed Ofcom that it has failed to achieve three of the key targets.

Among other targets, Openreach must:

➤ ensure that the mean Time to Provide completed orders is no more than 38 working days in each relevant year;
➤ ensure that it completes 94% of provisions for MPF and GEA – FTTC services, on time; and
➤ ensure that it completes 85% of its repairs for faults that are subject to Service Management Level 2, on time.

Openreach has informed Ofcom that in 2022/23 it:

➤ took a mean time to provide completed orders of 38.36 days;
➤ completed 93.8% of provisions for MPF and GEA – FTTC services on time in London and the South East; and
➤ completed 84.2% of repairs for faults subject to Service Management Level 2 on time in Wales and Midlands.

In fairness, Openreach has only fallen short by a fairly small margin, and so we’d be surprised if Ofcom ended up taking any significant action against the operator. But nevertheless, the regulator clearly felt it was enough of a problem to warrant them launching a new investigation (here).

“The quality-of-service obligations were imposed to ensure that Openreach provides an appropriate level of service to its customers. The obligations are intended to be a lower bound, met under all but very exceptional circumstances. Ofcom takes compliance with the quality-of-service obligations very seriously and the investigation will examine Openreach’s performance in respect of the year 2022/23,” said Ofcom.

UPDATE 11:32am

We’ve had a comment from Openreach, which helps to put the above issues into context, given last year’s strikes.

A spokesperson for Openreach told ISPreview:

“We recently told Ofcom that we’d narrowly missed three of its 35 ‘Quality of Service’ targets between July and December 2022 – mainly due to the impact of industrial action. We’re really disappointed by this, and we’re sorry to every customer that was impacted by the action, but we’re also confident that it was an isolated issue.

We recovered quickly once the industrial action ended and we’re now beating all of the targets whilst continuing to prioritise improvements in services for all of our customers. We’re also encouraged that our Net Promoter Scores – the ratings they give us every month – have recently reached record highs.

We’ll carry on publishing our performance levels transparently, and we’ll comply fully with Ofcom’s investigation.”