Homes in the Suffolk (England) village of Felsham have been left without access to broadband and phone services for over a week because, allegedly, Openreach (BT) are unable to fix the problem – a damaged telecoms pole that was struck during a car accident on Cockfield Road – until they’ve received “an estimate” from the driver’s insurance company.
According to the Suffolk News (via Thinkbroadband), a Ford Fiesta collided with a pole last Monday, which was then hit again by an unfortunate motorcyclist as it lay across the road. The female driver of the Fiesta was later arrested on suspicion of drink-driving, while the motorcyclist was taken to Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
The damage has caused a protracted outage of broadband and phone services to a number of homes and the odd business in the area, which has been extremely disruptive, particularly to vulnerable users. But interestingly, one local customer of broadband ISP BT was told by support staff that the reason it was taking so long is because “Openreach was waiting for ‘an estimate’ from the driver’s insurance company before it could complete works.”
At this point people might logically assume that Openreach would have fixed the problem with their critical network infrastructure first and then resolved responsibility for the costs later, to avoid any of the often-inherent delays that can occur when dealing with insurance companies. But this appears not to be the case and Openreach has yet to comment (we’ve asked and will report back soon).
However, it is worth noting that BT itself might not be giving a full appraisal of the facts when they gave this as the excuse, since Openreach has previously informed ISPreview that it typically takes around 20 days to fix damaged poles (here) and we’re only around 8-9 days in to that window.
Pole repairs can also depend upon wider issues of road permits/permissions, availability of engineering resources and the level of local damage etc. We’ve seen before how some homes in remote rural areas have been left to wait for up to 8-12 weeks before repairs, such as in cases of extreme damage (rare). But in urban areas a downed pole may be a matter of hours or just a few short days.