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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.