COVID19 – Installation and Faults Update

The UK Government recently announced new stricter guidelines advising that people must stay at home except for essential travel and daily exercise. Onecom have received an update from our carriers informing us on how this affects our customers and the services we provide.

The key points are:

They will now prioritise only the essential work and minimise work that requires their engineers to enter end customer premises.

Provision work carried out by Service Delivery and Fibre and Network Delivery will be limited to:

• Self-install activities (i.e. where there is no engineering visit to the end customer premises)i
• Service to vulnerable end customers (in-home and carried out safely, only where essential).
• Those end customers who have no other form of broadband or telephony available. (This will be managed through escalation channels).
• On-premises work for critical national infrastructure customers (NHS, pharmacies, utilities, emergency services, retail and wholesale food distribution outlets, financial services businesses and other categories defined by the Government).

Repair work for both volume and business products will continue to focus on restoring service, with safe working practices, and with revised processes to reduce social interaction further wherever possible.

As a result, and with immediate effect:

• Openreach have delayed all new appointments for provision (new lines or changes to existing line locations) until 01 June 2020.
• Openreach will attempt to complete any already appointed inflight orders from outside of the premises.
• Orders that do not require an engineer to attend will continue to go ahead including the transfer of service and upgrades to FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet).
• Engineers will be asked NOT to enter the end customer premises and to enable/restore service where possible from outside of the premises, with the exception of critical national infrastructure customers as referenced above.

Openreach have also issued a Nationwide Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control (MBORC) which applies to the provision and repair of products and services, including but not limited to analogue lines & ISDN, FTTC & FTTP, ADSL, Ethernet services including EAD and New Sites.

Openreach issue MBORC in the rarest of conditions when they feel the conditions prevent them from being able to provide or repair service within the target lead times, and in the current climate it has been deemed reasonable to implement these measures. I am sure you will understand that these are unprecedented times – and therefore, the above is put in place to ensure everyone’s safety.