Coronavirus

A&A and COVID-19

Here is special information regarding our services during the Coronavirus outbreak. We appreciate the patience and understanding that our customers are giving us during this time. The outlook changes daily,

Updated 2021-01-06:

September 2021 - update

Availability for engineers for Broadband ordering and fault fixing is pretty much back to pre-pandemic normality now. Unless things change this page will no longer be updated.

January 2021 - update

Delays for new FTTP/G.FAST orders where the premises has an existing connection

Starting from 7th January Openreach will be delaying FTTP/G.FAST orders where the premises already has an existing connection. ie - customers wanting to order additional lines will have a delay until at least March. We will have an escalation process available where our customer has no existing broadband service or is receiving a service of less than 30Mbps (to help support home working and schooling). Get in touch with our sales team if this affects you.

The information below from November and May still stands true today.

November 2020 - update

The information below pretty much stands true today as it has done over the past few months. The main problem we are seeing is with delays and missed appointments for new installs. Where there are missed appointments happening we are only told about after the appointment slot has passed. This is very frustrating for our customers and our staff.

29th May 2020 - Engineer appointments for installs

Openreach has started opening up the appointment book for provisioning, where the time the engineer would have to spend inside the premises is limited. Experience of this, so far, has been variable with some appointments requiring premises access being completed successfully and others not.

This slightly changes the prior situation - advised on 25th March - that they would now prioritise only "essential" work and would minimise work that requires their engineers to enter customer premises.

As far as A&A is aware, this means installs or regrades that require an onsite visits may possibly go ahead now (and indeed we've had some successes). We expect that installs and regrades will still be carried out if access to premises is not required.

  • Inflight orders requiring an engineer visit inside the premises may be completed, depending on the scope of the work (and length of job). Openreach will attempt to complete appointed inflight orders that can be done outside of the premises.
  • Orders without an engineer appointment required will continue to go ahead where no visit is required to go to the premises (e.g. migrations, upgrades to Fibre to the Cabinet)

There are avenues for prioritising work for vulnerable customers, those with no other form of broadband and critical national infrastructure sites. Contact us for more information.

Engineer appointments for fault repair

Repair work will continue to be focused on restoring service with safe working practices, and with revised processes to further reduce social interaction wherever possible. Openreach engineers may access customer premises. However, most of the time a fault is not at the customer premises so we expect faults to be fixed where possible, but expect delays.

Our contact with our suppliers

Openreach/BT did cut back a lot of their contact points with us in the early stages of lockdown - particularly their callcentres in India. However, from our experience, this is now back to normal service.


Equipment deliveries

We are still posting out equipment (Routers, FireBricks, SIMs etc). These are normally sent by Royal Mail. There may be delays due to the postal service, but we'll try to ship equipment ASAP.

Contacting us

Our normal channels of communications are open as normal. Our staff are working from their homes, so please do excuse the occasional dog bark or parrot squark etc. We usually answer phone calls within a few rings, but if you have problems getting through then please do email, we will respond to email (support@aa.net.uk) and SMS (01344 400999) out of hours where possible.

Other ways we can help

We've listed some other ways that we can help our customers during this time on our news page: Small ways A&A can help

We'll be automatically topping up HOME::1 and SOHO::1 quotas: A&A will boost your quota for free if you need it until 1st September 2021.

Contact Sales

email sales@aa.net.uk
phone 03333 400222
(Mon-Fri 9am-5pm)
sms 01344 400222

Contact Support

email support@aa.net.uk
phone 03333 400999
(Mon-Fri 8am-6pm,
Sat 10am-2pm)
sms 01344 400999