Travellers' site wild goose chase for BT engineers, leaves resident frustrated

The resident from Little Billington was left cut off for over two weeks after BT engineers were denied entry to the travellers’ land.

She said: “The problem was an administrative one between BT and OpenReach, one of whom mistakenly thought we lived at a traveller site. The engineers were refused entry on their first visit to the site for some reason, so that delayed things too.

“A few days later, I received a call from an OpenReach engineer at the traveller site asking where our property was! He was surprised when he found we didn’t live there.”

Engineers found the problem had nothing to do with the travellers’ site, and reconnected the resident within minutes by attending a BT box in Sandhills. An operations manager later visited her to apologise.

A BT spokesman said: “At no stage did Openreach think that this customer lived on the travellers’ site. After the fault was raised on January 23, our tests indicated that the fault was in part of our network on travellers land. At that stage we were prevented from the site to access our network.

“Engineers continued to explore this fault whilst we were working on gaining access, and on 7th February were able to repair equipment in a nearby lane, not on the travellers’ site, which successfully restored services. We would of course like to apologise for any inconvenience caused whilst this fault was being worked on.”

The woman added: “The ineptitude of some companies continues to amaze me. I had to email the CEO of BT to get things moving.”