Provisioning - A saga

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ADSL Provisioning is probably one of the two most impactly customer facing aspects of the ADSL service provided by various suppliers, with the other being the faults troubleshooting and resolution process. We've all heard reports of TalkTalk taking months and months to deliver service on the their LLU platform with their extremely large backlogs, but other ISPs often experience delays too. Since taking over the Provisioning Team at PlusNet, ensuring that these delays are to a minimum are now my responsibility. There are various aspects where delays can occur, namely DACS (line sharing devices non compatible with ADSL), lack of capacity at exchanges and ever more commonly these days, "Tags" on the line whereby the previous tenant of a location has not had their ADSL service cancelled, meaning that the new ISP is not able to place an order on the line until this has been removed. There have bbeen considerable improvements seen here over the last year with BT implementing their "Tags on the Line" team for both customers and ISPs. Possibly the hardest part in the ADSL Provisioning aspect of the service is the house moving process. Of course, you can request a simultaneous provide code from BT an they will happpily tell you that you can easily move house with any supplier. In a slightly more realistic approach, you need to give the ISP at least 7 working days to approach the request, the simultaneous provide code has to be correct, which often it isn't and there's generally a 50% success rate at best. Or you can go down the old fashioned route. Cease the service at your old house and provide the service at the new house. This is generally pretty straightforward, unless of course you want to keep your phone number. Let's face it, why wouldn't you want to? Save all the hassle of having to redistribute your phone number, getting various business cards reprinted, the list goes on. What the majority of our customers do not realise (and for extremely valid reasons!!) is that if you keep the same telephone number, we are unable to place the new provide order until the cease has gone through. So essentially you're looking at roughly 3 weeks for the entire process to complete, leaving the customer without a broadband service for 1-2 weeks, assuming everything goes to plan. This is down to the cease and provide orders both takinng 5 working days to complete and relies on the BT Availability Checker updating itself, which often takes a couple of days. Then there's the more recent development from our friends at OpenReach and Wholesale. We've been seeing a number of orders (upto about 25%) being cancelled by BT, merely stating "duplicate order". Now, we're totally unable to see whhat the duplicate order may be, as BT are now running on two backend systems from a Provisioning perspective. That of Wholesale, with their e.Co system that we and other ISPs use for Provisioning and Fault Reporting. then there's that of the OpenReach Portal, which we do not have access to, coupled with the fact that the two systems don''t seem to pair up too well. So this can lead to our having to place orders numerous times, despite speaking to various departments within BT and various levels. This is also affecting other ISP as a few post in the Zen forums are proving. The Provisioning Team always does make a conscious effort to contact any of our customers that experience delays with their orders, in fact it's our policy to always do so. I see this with the large number of outbound calls thhey are making every day. It's also the ethos thhat we are encouraging within the CSC as awhole, to just pick up the phone and call the customer instead of just sending a ticket, especially when the customer doesn't have access to the internet! Hopefully this (somewhat longer that expected) posting in the types of delays that can be experienced and the processes involved in what we have to do to get the service to your home will help increase your understanding as to what we get upto in our team. Jusqu'a le fois prochaine! James