OPENREACH engineers working in the vicinity should be good news, but in the North Carmarthenshire village of Llansawel, a number of residents have complained about broadband loss every few minutes.
We contacted Openreach, a subsidiary of BT, to ask why this loss of service is happening. None of the ‘help’ solutions on their website appeared at all relevant, until ‘further help’ was offered. I clicked on the link. An error message came up: “404 error. We’re sorry but we can’t find the page you are looking for. This may be because the page has moved, page address has changed, link may be broken.”
Further searching revealed a contact form – which says that Openreach only deals with mess left in the street or failure to restore the environment after works, positioning of new equipment, or dangerous driving by engineers. There was nothing about engineering works damaging the service.
For that, individual broadband users have to contact their service providers who, because the problem most likely originates with engineering works, struggle to find a solution.
In Llansawel, Openreach is digging up the road (which was resurfaced two years ago) to lay fibre optic cable as part of the Welsh Government’s Superfast Cymru scheme to bring fast broadband to areas which would not receive it without subsidy. By October 19, more than 590,000 premises had access to superfast broadband under the £425 million scheme, which is funded by the Welsh Government, the UK Government, and the European Union’s European Regional Development Fund, together providing about £225 million in total, and by BT which is funding the rest.
The current roll-out, the second contract, is expected to finish in October 2017 when 17,500 kilometres of optical fibre cable and 3,000 green roadside cabinets should have been installed.
The ambition is excellent, but the process is detached from the public, who do not know when Openreach engineers will be in their road, for how long they will be there, and who have no one to contact if their existing broadband service suffers during the works.
It’s quite a paradox for a communications company.
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