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How much can an ISP "push" Open reach?

LeeWillRockYou

Pro Member
For many years I've had issues with my landline being unstable and eventually I gave up on it and swapped to 4G. Overtime that also became unstable, so took a gamble and tried my landline again and wow, what a difference, still relatively slow compared to others but stable as duck!

That was until a few weeks ago, when out of nowhere we started to experience the same old issues, constant drop outs and slow speeds. It's been a pain in the arse, amplified more by the fact that now my wife works from home.

We're with Now broadband, simply because of the 30 days, low cost unlimited contract. I've never really had a problem with them as a company. But every time we've called them up, they've booked an open reach engineer to come, who supposedly "fixes it", it does work for a day or two and then we're back to square 1.

Unfortunately I'm never home when they come, I've not had a chance to dig further and my wife doesn't do technology, so she's not pressed them further.

Now to.my question (at last). How far can an ISP like Nowbroadband go with open reach? Can they for example ask them to dig my hole road up to install a new landline if required? Like, who do I pester to get the sorted once and for all?

Thanks for reading 😬
 
Unfortunately, I think we're getting to the times now where Openreach are starting to say if its can't be fixed then the property can be deemed unsuitable for Broadband, they only have obligation to provide the phone service and even now thats been pulled so I'm not sure where they sit.

I say this based on what I've heard from a friend on a long long with DSL who had his service disconnected by Openreach and some form of block on xdsl services on it.

I also had an issue with Virgin Media in recent history where they put a unserviceable marker on my mums address as they couldn't fix a fault, but that was just a bell end at Virgin Forums getting all flustered because I said fix the issue or disconnect the account free of charge when I had packet loss issues due to new hub with Gigabit service.
 
Have a look at switching to Andrews and Arnold for a few months. They are not cheap and really are a niche ISP.for geeks, but they really know what they are doing. They run their own monitoring on top of what OpenReach gives them which gives them their own raw data on the performance of your service, when you ring their support the people who answer the phone are clueful technical people based in the UK who will use their skills to direct OpenReach to fix their customer faults. If anyone is going to give OpenReach the necessary info and a hard time to fix a fault, then A&A should be at the top of the list.
 
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Thanks mate. Funny thing is, I did go with A&A a few years ago and they admitted defeat!

I've just spoken with some of my neighbours, apparently it's not just my internet. Which is kind of a relief in a way.
 
Is the instability different to what you had previously a few years ago? You report that it has been stable and reliable for the past few months so it seems that whatever fault might have been there back then could have been fixed and what you have now could be a new loose connection?
 
I'm pretty sure it's a new problem, like I mentioned in my last reply, the neighbours have mentioned that theirs is doing the same thing.

As it's a few houses having the issue, hopefully it'll prompt open reach to act faster. They did dig the side of the road up the other day. It didn't help but at least they did something 🤷🏻
 
Actually what might help here, if you are friendly with your neighbours is to collaborate to all log a fault with the same details.

Eg. Lost broadband from 4.10 to 4.18pm on Wed 10 Jul. My neighbours experience the same outage located at door numbers XX, XX, XX and they have also logged faults with their ISPs

This will generate multiple faults within OpenReach but with similar times being reported and hopefully the text pointing out that it's not just you making it through to at least one fault job you might hope that it will trigger the engineers to consider troubleshooting the fault in a different way.
 
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If you could get a couple of people to migrate to an ISP like A&A and both report fault and mention the other customer you might find they can get more traction, especially if the monitoring shows the same thing happening at same time
 
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