Noblettski
Member
We (Langford Budville Team Broadband) started a CFP with Openreach last June, submitting 110 addresses in our rural Somerset village on 1 August - having undertaken an extensive marketing campaign which involved leaflet drops, social media and setting up a dedicated website.
If anyone is considering going down a Community Fibre Project route with Openreach, please beware and read on!
We are on the brink of ours failing due to one very simple reason - dreadful and completely unacceptable customer care!
We now have 165 addresses, including 40 businesses who have pledged their interest - a healthy number inceed but not achieved lightly, or easily.
Sadly, however, our dealings with Openreach has been a litany of lack of response, consistent failure to answer our serious concerns and questions, a lack of clarity, honesty and mixed messages.
It is impossible to speak to anyone - our Rural Engagement Manager takes many weeks to get back to us despite countless emails and phone messages and we now find ourselves seriously up against the Gigabit Voucher application deadline of March 31.
Having gone to Openreach with our initial 110 addresses, they finally came back to us mid-October with indicative costs and an additional list of 257 addresses, many of which are not even in our parish - they just happen to connect to the same exchange in the next village. At one point further along the process, they gave us the total cabinet connections of 360. They told us that adding these additional properties, or as many as we can, would not increase costs (it did) and have basically ignored the fact that Gigaclear is about to go live in the Milverton outreaches area (the infrastructure for this was built during 2017/18 and then halted when their contract with Connecting Devon & Somerset was cancelled and any hope of reaching our village for the foreseeable future finished). Additionally, many addresses around Milverton can already get much higher speeds than our paltry 0.5-3Mbps and unreliable BT connections so are not likely to be interested in yet another FTTP choice.
We are at our wits end and have raised our issues with our MP, who has so far been helpful in chasing this up for us.
But, did you know that the only way to raise a formal complaint with Openreach is by going through your MP?! We found this out today and are still in disbelief. Yes you can complain via their Live Chat facility - but there is no dedicated CFP button to choose so you will get through to an agent who may put you in touch with yet someone else who doesn't know the history of your project nor has had any dealings with it. In other words, don't bother, you will get nowhere and will achieve nothing!
Our next step in all this would be to accept OR's final offer within 60 days; this came through on 7 January and indicates quite a high shortfall thanks to the additional addresses we were forced to include. But with all the outstanding questions and concerns still unresolved nor addressed, we are nowhere near being able to agree or sign a contract (aside from the fact that extra time and money commitment is needed beforehand to set up a Community Interest Company in order to do this). Nobody with sense would consider entering into any kind of commitment with a company who operates in such an unprofessional, haphazard and frustrating manner.
If we continue to get no response from our Rural Engagement Manager (as of today, 22 January, we're still waiting) to discuss where we might go from here, we will have no option other than to abandon our project after months of serious hard graft. Our villagers will be no closer to getting a decent and reliable broadband connection and all our efforts will have gone to waste.
Please don't undertake this route if you're hoping for a simple, easy fix. The process is opaque to say the least, very difficult, very time-consuming and may well fail at the final hurdle!
If anyone is considering going down a Community Fibre Project route with Openreach, please beware and read on!
We are on the brink of ours failing due to one very simple reason - dreadful and completely unacceptable customer care!
We now have 165 addresses, including 40 businesses who have pledged their interest - a healthy number inceed but not achieved lightly, or easily.
Sadly, however, our dealings with Openreach has been a litany of lack of response, consistent failure to answer our serious concerns and questions, a lack of clarity, honesty and mixed messages.
It is impossible to speak to anyone - our Rural Engagement Manager takes many weeks to get back to us despite countless emails and phone messages and we now find ourselves seriously up against the Gigabit Voucher application deadline of March 31.
Having gone to Openreach with our initial 110 addresses, they finally came back to us mid-October with indicative costs and an additional list of 257 addresses, many of which are not even in our parish - they just happen to connect to the same exchange in the next village. At one point further along the process, they gave us the total cabinet connections of 360. They told us that adding these additional properties, or as many as we can, would not increase costs (it did) and have basically ignored the fact that Gigaclear is about to go live in the Milverton outreaches area (the infrastructure for this was built during 2017/18 and then halted when their contract with Connecting Devon & Somerset was cancelled and any hope of reaching our village for the foreseeable future finished). Additionally, many addresses around Milverton can already get much higher speeds than our paltry 0.5-3Mbps and unreliable BT connections so are not likely to be interested in yet another FTTP choice.
We are at our wits end and have raised our issues with our MP, who has so far been helpful in chasing this up for us.
But, did you know that the only way to raise a formal complaint with Openreach is by going through your MP?! We found this out today and are still in disbelief. Yes you can complain via their Live Chat facility - but there is no dedicated CFP button to choose so you will get through to an agent who may put you in touch with yet someone else who doesn't know the history of your project nor has had any dealings with it. In other words, don't bother, you will get nowhere and will achieve nothing!
Our next step in all this would be to accept OR's final offer within 60 days; this came through on 7 January and indicates quite a high shortfall thanks to the additional addresses we were forced to include. But with all the outstanding questions and concerns still unresolved nor addressed, we are nowhere near being able to agree or sign a contract (aside from the fact that extra time and money commitment is needed beforehand to set up a Community Interest Company in order to do this). Nobody with sense would consider entering into any kind of commitment with a company who operates in such an unprofessional, haphazard and frustrating manner.
If we continue to get no response from our Rural Engagement Manager (as of today, 22 January, we're still waiting) to discuss where we might go from here, we will have no option other than to abandon our project after months of serious hard graft. Our villagers will be no closer to getting a decent and reliable broadband connection and all our efforts will have gone to waste.
Please don't undertake this route if you're hoping for a simple, easy fix. The process is opaque to say the least, very difficult, very time-consuming and may well fail at the final hurdle!
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