An oddly under-reported little disaster.
For over a week now, thousands of BT Customers in South East London have been without telephone, fax or broadband connections due to a contractor 'slicing through a cable the thickness of an oak tree' - according to one BT technician in Pomeroy St, SE14 on sunday morning.
Businesses along the Old kent rd as far as new Cross have been effected, and while some subscribers have been lucky, and been able to persuade technicians to 'do them first', others may have to wait another week, or even longer.
Even at a time when the mobile phone is so common, a landline is a necessity, not a luxury, and the incentive to restore services should be more than the 60 pence a day compensation offered by BT. Unless, that is, BT is trying to send the message that its vulnerable tangle of cables is the technology of the past, and that any sensible person would switch to something more ethereal - or even to a cable provider, which at least has the benefit of smaller bundles of subscribers, in shorter lengths, to slice through.
Yesterday (28 May) a miscreant in Maidenhead stole 200m of copper wire from the BT infrastructure - leaving 450 homes in the area without telephone of internet access.
ReplyDeleteNow the theft is not BT's fault, and the 'agent' who took my call (in India) did all he possibly could to find a solution. But the bottom line is a two-week wait for service to be resumed.
Is this the level of contingency plan we should expect?
Ouch. At 60p per day.
ReplyDeleteAs Julie Waters has Mary Whitehouse say in last night's BBC dramatisation:
'If this was the gas board, there'd be rioting in the streets by now.'