A tail of (not) getting 5 gigafast And now cannot even leave.

[chaplic]

Early August I noticed sky were offering 5Gbit internet in my area so I signed up, and spent a good bit of cash upgrading network stuff in my house to take advantange of it.

Install logistics went well and it was installed on 11th Aug. Only for the installer to tell me there was low light levels at the pole (ONT to pole was fine) and if it worked at all it would be unreliable. In other words, probably dodgy fibre cable between the pole and fibre exchange, though Im the first on the street to get it as far as i know. He told me not to worry he'd escalate it, and I still had my 900Mbit sky fibre so not end of the world. 

Until the next day, old connection died and I got a 'welcome to your new service' text. The new solution did work for some time. Then died, then came to life again. Rinse and repeat, with of course a dead telephone line too. Call sky explain, go through usual 'take a photo'. Fair enough. Passed to network team. Great.

Then..nothing. Called maybe every day or 2 and spoke to a very nice and concerned person who could not do anything other than escalate again and promise me a call back (this promise was repeatedly broken, I had literally one call back to tell me, well nothing). I did have two visits by the same set of city fibre and their subbies, who were baffled as to why they were there as they can only deal with pole to ONT issues. He even showed me on his app passing the job to their second line team the last time, and the poor light levels on his meter.

so, fast forward to today and been through the same cycle. Agent was in complete agreement with me but has zero other avenues other than 'doesn't work mate'. I'm in no doubt CityFibre are clueless but I'm not a customer of theirs.

Agent advised me to cancel. I asked to just go back to the openreached based sky. He said he can't do that maybe cancelleations can, but as sky prefer city fibre I might be reprovisioned on that. But he removed various things on the acccount presumably so I can cancel

So he put me through to cancellations, I explain I dont want to leave and the whole story.. to be told she cannot cancel me as theres a problem on the account and she might get back to me by Tuesday. Which i totally believe I'll get a call...

I looked at Ofcom, well not ofcom as they dont to seem to be involved other than to collect stats so there are other consumer bodies but nothing will happen till 8 weeks which is just ridiculous.

So Im basically in broadband purgatory.

[chaplic]

So, no call back today about cancellation (SHOCKED, I TELL YOU, SHOCKED!) but the broadband stayed up all day so I amused myself by thinking they have actually fixed it then they would just go cancel it. Which might have happened as the connection has dropped.  Place your bets... 

[JimM1]

@chaplic You never know, might have been the push to get CF to look see what was causing the low light feed to the Distro connection point. No doubt it all takes time to sort it all out with new procedures etc!

[chaplic]

oh I've pushed, and work in a similar field so the agents have been talking to be pretty straight when I've been asking the right questions. It seems sky can only talk to firstline CF and thats where things fall apart. Sky agents either talk a good game or are genuine but hamstrung by a bad process, I'm inclined to think its the latter.

It's also nuts they dont have a service design to go from CF>>Openreach

So now, as advised by agent I'm trying to cancel and cant even do that.. was supposed to have a call back today between 1 and 2 as they couldnt cancel...

[chaplic]

Well I guess, other than hearing back about my complaint, this is drawing to a conclusion. There was no call back about cancellation, but the agent (who I had spoken to before and remembered me and was very apologetic about their helplessness) advised the best way to cancel  was to switch to someone else who only uses bt openreach. I detest BT but have held my nose and ordered EE broadbroad. "only" 900mbit but hopefully might stay up a bit (I send this using the 5G router I had to buy as sky is down).

I'm cancelling sky Q and full fat TV subscriptions at the same time, so unless there's another sting in the tail, goodbye sky, been a customer 20+ years.

[Chrisee]

@chaplic you are not the only customer reporting issues with City Fibre What is certain they seem liable to the same issues we see from Openreach which is not a surprise but is disapointing. Sky have limited ability to get CF to address issues like your's which is in the optical distribution either at the head dnd with a faulty OLT generating the signal or some light loss in the fibre and passive splitters connecting to the pole. 

It is early days in the relationship between Sky and CF and is still in its development phase so only a small Sky customer service team are trained to deal with CF issues.  This does seem to cause issues when you phone in as while the IVR should pick up that you are a CF customer, calling from the phone number registered to your a/c as that helps, and route you to thst team it doesnt always work.

Disapointing story.

[chaplic]

All the agents I spoke to seemed to understand City Fibre, certainly the last agent I spoke to (had met him before) seemed battled hardened by it.

Got a call from retention today. Told her it was simply not possible to give me an offer to remain i would accept

[JimM1]

@chaplic You certainly are a man of principal's and although you are off and running to the EE Darkside do take a look on the Forum, may not be a smooth transition depending on what EE Hardware you are settling on for the 900Mb/s FF package. You will find me as JimM11 on there!😶

[chaplic]

I'm not sure it's principal (well, sacking off sky TV I'm doing out of spite!), and also conscious I might be leaping out of the frying pan, there just didn't seem to be a way to resolve it.

If I got feedback like "yeah we need to run some new fibre, team will be on site but will take 2 weeks" I would have limped on with mobile 5G solution I had to buy. It was just an endless loop of "sorry this bad, let me send a note to city fibre"

The inner geek in me wanted a 5Gbit internet connection (which I had invested about a £1000 to take advantage of) and in fairness I've had 20+ years of decent service out of sky. 

Its just that there simply seemed to be no way to resolve this (not just my view, they sky agents view) and I couldnt even go back to the old openreach service from sky!