Vocal Voices

So as a culmination of two months worth of chirpy letters and emails extolling the benefits of Full Fibre Broadband and BT Digital Voice (where you have to access your landline via your home router / smart hub), a pleasant operative from Openreach finally arrived on time at 1:00 pm today, spent 5 minutes attempting to chisel open the BT hatch in the driveway (which probably hasn't been opened in the last 30 years since the house was built), and once they had opened it, using copious amounts of WD40, declared that because we have "armoured cabling" running into the house (somewhat unusual, I gather) which they couldn't remove, they couldn't complete the installation of the new fibre-optic cabling today.

A man from "Civils" will have to come with a digger at some point and remove a number of flagstones outside the front of the house in order to bypass this armoured cabling. Then Openreach will have to come back to complete the optic job.
In the meantime we have acquired a large white arrow on our flagstones indicating the ones to be lifted.

When I asked about the time-delay for this, they said they had no real idea!

Still, we shifted a load of furniture before they came, hoovered extensively places which may not have been hooved for some time , and annoyed countless spiders.
The question now is - do we put it all back, only to have to move it again .....

What a palaver!

Os, we were told on four or five occassions that the vocal whatsit service would start on date X; it never did. We had to ring up to find the real date.
So prepare yourself for some more false starts

Oh flipping 'eck Ossie! I hope it gets done soon xx

In June last year I changed from Virgin to BT for braodband. BT had put new cabling so I could get full fibre to the house.

When the enginer came to do the installation he was goingto put a new fibre cable from the pole to my house. The existing phone cable was put up
when I had the phone installed in 1964.
He came to say there would be a delay as he could not usea ladder to get to the junction box at the top of the wooden pole. Evidently there is a red sticker
on the pole saying ladders must not be used for acess. So he had to send for s cherry picker. He was able to do other work while he was waiting.
I have since had my lanline disconnected as I did not use it very much. It has saved me some money.
I only use my mobile now.

Found someone on the local Freecyce group who wanted the BT phones so I did not have to throw them away