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Openreach porting – final update

Simon Woodhead

Simon Woodhead

27th March 2020

By Simon Woodhead

Further to yesterday’s ‘“plan B” post relating to the issue of “BT halting porting operations?”, we are in receipt of more information.

We have a list of questions posed on yesterday’s call with attempts at answers. Unfortunately this is protectively marked as ‘confidential’. Coincidentally, yesterday evening (day 3) we also had acknowledgement of our letter to Ofcom. That is similarly protectively marked as ‘confidential’. There’s a pattern emerging here and it doesn’t help your customers.

So, whilst we can’t share the contents, we can interpret them for you, such as they are!

Automated functions continue to work but we know how often they go wrong and require intervention. That intervention is still being ‘stood up’ and BT expect to have it operational by the middle of next week. Escalations are now operational but are prioritising orders for vulnerable people. We’ve been asked not to escalate to escalations as we normally would to keep that channel clear.

There is no sign yet of when telephone service will be resumed, and our experience is that this is critical to get things done. So we genuinely don’t know what level of service to expect next week, especially if the team ‘stood up’ are new.

We have received a trickle of order acceptances but right now we’re holding off confirming to customers that orders are accepted. We expect that these are either going to pass the activation date or require the date changing. We will release them to you once we’re happy the date is reliable, as it further multiplies the work all round otherwise. Hopefully we’ll be able to start doing so next week.

Similarly, we’re still processing orders you send to us via our API or portal, but where BT are involved we are adding additional lead time to minimise the back and forth as much as possible. Of course, every other operator, including others who off-shored to India as well, are operating normally and putting customers first.

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