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News and Comment January 2024

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19 January - The open reach of BiB

One of several BiB rants in recent weeks was about BT at first refusing to transfer an 8310 phone number rented by an elderly lady for more than 50 years to the other side of Yarnton Way and later finding themselves unable to do so because of what may have been an Openreach cock-up or maybe simply a system that works at a snail’s pace.

It should have been a run-of-the-mill five minute job.

Fortunately a reader (thanks Roger) mentioned the problem to a BT manager who lives locally who called me for more details. He thought the situation was as ridiculous as I did and said he would do his best to pull some internal strings. The lady had no phone over Christmas and New Year but on 8th January a new connection was provided; by the sound of things a digital connection delivered via fibre to the premises but with a different number.

Today that has been rectified and the number has been successfully reverted to what it used to be thereby saving the old lady the hassle of notifying a life-time’s collection of contacts.

Everyone involved is extremely grateful to the manager who worked his magic inside the monolith that is BT but I do wonder about what we have done to this country through centralisation and computerisation. (Don’t mention Fujitsu!)

BT appears to have a single country-wide unit dealing with number transfers from one of their isolated ivory towers.

Is that really better than having a couple of blokes inside the exchange taking local customer calls on 151 (or ENG when I first started) and going to fix faults straight away? I personally changed a phone number during my GPO training when I was 19 years old. The job took a few minutes with a soldering iron; abandoned not long afterwards in favour of tight wire wrapping.

Is it really cheaper to centralise the operation and potentially annoy so many customers who have the freedom to take their business elsewhere?

Could it be symptomatic of why the productivity in this country is abysmal? I had a feeling that computers were going to be a mixed blessing when they first began to take over.

I, and with no one to help out, did all the programming of the first computers monitoring International telephone traffic. Circa 1988 and soon after the system went live, I was asked by one of the more senior people how many calls had been made from call boxes with Guildford phone numbers to the USA over whatever the required period was.

I replied “Give me 30 minutes to run the data and I will let you know” and the boss man got quite shirty about having to wait. I said “Graham you would not have dared ask that question a few months ago and you would have probably got along well enough without those numbers”.

I feared that computers would bog us down with numbers and bury us in paper. Was I wrong?

I finished assembling another new computer from standard components earlier today. The prices are getting to be a bit silly but I can’t seem to keep away from them.

 

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