I thought about adding this in the Broadband, Fibre Broadband and Telephone forums, but it actually affects all three so probably best fits here.
We have had no end of issues with phones / broadband over the last few years, at least 2 or three times a year a cable magically becomes faulty and an OR engineer is dispatched to fix the problem.
Time and time again the issue is with the cable being damaged in either the street cabinet or one of the joint boxes in the road leading to our property. We suspect, although it is impossible to be certain, that when work is done in the cabinet or boxes for someone else our cables get knocked and start breaking as we have seen at least 3 instances of faults directly following an OR engineer doing something in the road for someone else. In fact this time the phone was at fault and the OR phone engineer caused a problem in the broadband cable, which of course they couldn't fix as they only do phones !
This current time the engineer even said in the fix notes on the call that the issue is going to happen again because the aluminium cables are crumbling and need replacing.
Unfortunately the engineer didn't fill in the correct form and so now nothing will be done as PlusNet will not do anything on our behalf because the correct paperwork was not completed, and I cannot contact OR to ask them why they have not started the process of replacement.
PlusNet have told us that now we will have to wait for the next fault before we can even start to talk about the issue again as they have no power (or desire) to fight on our behalf.
As usual with OR the consumer has no rights on the state of the equipment leading to the property, there are no guides / laws on how many faults have to occur before something is done and the only obligation is to fix the immediate issue not to guarantee their work will not fail again.
I can't think of any other business or service that has so much distance from the public and won't even allow any discussion of fault to be entered into. Anyone else that provides a product or service has to abide by consumer laws, OR have a free reign to continually fail.
So I guess for a discussion topic has anyone else managed to successfully get OR to replace aluminium cables and if so how did you go about it ?
