Performance: fair

A slightly more serious operation than ours

During a large part of today, BT subcontractors were replacing a telegraph pole not many yards away, the telegraph pole from which our landline and broadband services are delivered.

Neither landline nor broadband services were available for most of this time.

Which is fair enough as far as pole replacement time is concerned, but the first we heard of it was when someone knocked on the door mid morning and told us services would be down for a couple of hours or so. Not clever if you, your partner and your children were all trying to work from home. Not to mention Grandma in her cupboard, playing around on eBay. O2, by way of contrast, send out texts to warn subscribers when they are doing a spot of planned maintenance, usually the day before.

At around 16:00, they knocked on the door to ask if services were back. To which the answer was landline no, Broadband yes. Some fiddling around. Still the same. Plug a widget with lights in the socket just inside our front door and some more fiddling around. By around 16:30 all up and running again. But if we had been out - which I grant is unlikely just presently - they would presumably have walked away from a landline which was not working.

None of the engineers - maybe four of them altogether - bothered with face masks when they knocked on doors.

There was some talk in the road of emergency pole replacement, which would go some way to excusing the lack of notice, although not quite sure how you have a pole emergency. After all, they are quite substantial. And thoroughly tarred. In any event, all things considered, not brilliant.

PS 1: the BT Broadband service is generally very good - as it should be as I believe I am paying well over the odds for it. See also reference 1.

PS 2: Tuesday: BT may not have given us any warning of pole action, but this morning BH found a bedraggled bit of A4 sculling around the wet road, which should have been attached to the new pole, telling us that a new pole had been installed and what we could do if we didn't like it. Which is not quite the same as being told before the event. With all of this being amply covered by Paragraph 75(2) of Part 11 of Schedule 3A of the Communications Act 2003, reproduced at reference 2. Performance make of fair unchanged.

PS 3: BH also reminds me that FIL used to have a telegraph pole planted in his front garden, to which BT had right of access. For this, he was paid the not so ample sum of £15 or so per annum.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/more-bad-news.html.

Reference 2: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/schedule/3A.