As promised, BT came to mend our broadband connection on Wednesday. It's good for businesses to keep their promises, less impressive that in an era where ministers make speeches about the importance of rolling out ultra fast rural broadband, the monopoly infrastructure supplier is happy to leave customers without any internet connectivity at all for four days after the line fault was reported. Lucky we have not one but two back-up 3 Mobile dongles. Lucky for us, that is. I don't suppose BT cares one way or the other.
A BT Openworld van drew up outside the kitchen while I was still eating my porridge, and an engineer appeared at the door saying I had a fault with my telephone? He didn't offer any form of identification or fault report number, but on the basis that we had reported a fault and the chances of a fraudster turning up at that moment in a proper BT badged van were slim, I let him in to look at the modem. If I'd know someone was coming round maybe I'd have cleared the boxes of beehive parts out of the hall and run the vacuum cleaner over the worst of the cat fluff.
It's a nice question of etiquette whether to hover over a stranger who arrives at your house unannounced but sort of expected. You don't want to look as though you don't trust them not to fiddle with your stuff, let alone nick something, but on the other hand you wouldn't normally leave an unknown person unsupervised in a room containing a lot of electronics and financial papers lying about. I decided that human decency required I take him at face value, and retreated to the kitchen to eat my porridge. He stuck his head round the door in a few minutes to check that I wouldn't be going anywhere in the next couple of hours, as he'd put a pinger on the line and it told him that the fault was seventeen hundred and something metres away, so he needed to go and look for it, then come back to collect the test device.
He returned less than two hours later, saying it had taken him a little while to work out where the wires went, and the fault when he'd found it was an odd one. Somebody had cut the wire. I queried this, and he elaborated. Someone doing other work had disconnected our line and left it, presumably not knowing what it did. A BT Openworld someone? He shrugged. They used a lot of contractors, he said. I digested this. Someone, presumably an engineer either directly employed by our broadband provider or subcontracted by them, had randomly decided to disconnect our broadband one Friday and just leave it. What does this do, then? Dunno, never mind. I suggested, gently since it was not this engineer's fault, that it might be worthwhile mentioning this to management, who would presumably have records of who was working in the area last Friday, since it was not very good to leave customers without a service they were paying for for four days, and having to pay extra for a replacement service from a different provider. An engineer deliberately disconnecting our line was rather different to, say, a tree branch rubbing on it and damaging it.
He agreed. He seemed a perfectly nice man, but I don't suppose he'll take it any further. It's a pretty rubbish way to run a business, though. We aren't happy customers, and BT have had the expense of sending an engineer plus van to fix something that apparently they caused in the first place.
Years ago there was a proposal to introduce fast wireless broadband in the area. The intended mast would have had a clear line of sight to our house, and we liked the sound of it. BT invested just enough in increasing the speed of the local internet service to kill the wireless project, but no more. Even now we can't reliably live stream from the BBC iplayer without multiple distracting thirty second pauses. And we are not in the wilds of the Welsh borders, but one of the most populous counties in England, less than seventy miles from the centre of London as the crow flies. Fast rural broadband would be very nice. Merely adequate commuter belt broadband would be even better.
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