Openreach - the mystical service that no one can reach...

When I was a child days out were less glamorous than they are today.  We would go to places like Beddington Sewage Works because they had an open day.  Or if we were really lucky we would go to the BT exchange.  The BT exchange had quite a lot of open days in the 80s where you could see exchange machines that still looked like the ones in Dial M for Murder.  This was because Mrs Thatcher was busy privatising Busby – if you see Sid tell him it didn’t go very well.

These days everything is still run by BT save the fibre optic cables of the rich and even they have to plug back into the phone lines so in order to maintain the illusion of private competition BT was split up by OfCom.  I know this because I was told so by a jolly soul who worked at SKY during a job interview. 

It was a two way exchange.  He asked me if his company gave me £1000 to “spend on fun” what I would spend it on and I asked him about internal competition in the telecommunications market. 

My explanation of how I would spend £1000 if he gave it to me was that it was a difficult question to answer since the fungibility of money meant that the £1000 would become indistinguishable from all my other savings.  He told me this was somewhat evasive and I could see his deputy raising her eyes to the glass ceiling. 

However, his explanation of the internal telecommunications market was much more enlightening.  As I understand it from what he said BT still owns almost the entire land telecommunications network but in order to give the illusion of competition Ofcom insisted that they be split up or erect a number of large Chinese Walls within their own organisation.  The latter option being the least competitive this was immediately done and thus Openreach was born. 

Other Chinese Walled subsidiaries were also born such as PlusNet where the fat club comic (Craig Murray – not the diplomat) with the jolly northern accent will “do you proud” by being fined £880k by Ofcom for continuing to bill customers for cancelled services.

So these days if you have to complain that your internet is not working you have to complain to Openreach.  Except you can’t.  You have to complain to your service provider who will call out an Openreach engineer.  You get no notes whatsoever of what this service engineer did or said and cannot apply for them except through your service provider who will lie to you about what was and what was not done.  This locks you into a Kafkaesque nightmare of calling your service provider to call out the Openreach engineer over and over again because any problem is never resolved because problems are always relayed through a myriad of call centre operators using an ITIL process known as Chinese Whispers.  For Chinese Whispers are all that can be heard through Chinese Walls.

If you want to talk to Openreach directly to corroborate their story of why your internet doesn’t work and what they haven’t done to fix it you can’t … because no one can reach Openreach.  Openreach are unreachable.

This is rubbed in by their website which in an open insult to consumers of broadband everywhere invites you to write in if you have a good thing to say about one of their engineers while at the same time telling you that if you have anything else to say… you can only do this through your service provider.

Openreach, as is explained in the above screengrab, are unreachable…. 

Unless, that is you want to kiss their bottom.