Communication breakdown in Hatherton

I and a number of other Hatherton area residents have been without our voice and internet connection due to a damaged BT phone line since Thursday 11th December.

We are advised the phone cable has been damaged during the installation of fibre optic cabling for the Superfast Broadband project.

BT Openreach will not talk to individual customers so we have to deal with our individual Internet Service Provider (ISP) call centres. They have made numerous promises to repair the fault ranging from within two days upon reporting the fault (13th December) to the latest which is 16th January. In which, unsurprisingly, we have little confidence.

It seems there is no specific person/organisation we can contact to progress this matter. Ofcom requires BT to repair 80% of faults within 2 days; this means one in five faults can take longer with apparently no maximum limit specified.

If after eight weeks the fault is not fixed then we can take it up with the Ombudsman.

How are those residents running businesses from home supposed to manage? Or students and school children? Or retired and employed people without access to the internet at work?

Getting access to the internet involves us in extra journeys to pubs/cafes which, whilst acceptable as a short term measure, are hardly suitable places to conduct one's confidential and financial affairs as those services are not necessarily secure.

The final irony is that we in Hatherton are not even going to benefit from the project as we are too far away from the nearest BT cabinet!

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.