Product Process descriptions

If an appointment is required to resolve the end customer’s issue, this will be indicated on the service test result.  Appointments must be booked if there is no diagnosed fault but you require further investigation of the issue.

To book an appointment while raising a portal-based trouble report, simply set the earliest date to begin looking for availability, and click next.  You will then see the available appointments and you can choose one that is convenient for your end customer:

If you’re using the standalone dialogue service to book an appointment, you’ll need to enter a number of additional parameters to obtain the available slots:

This will similarly return a list of available appointments from which you can reserve an appointment slot to enter into your trouble report.

Super-fast Visit Assure (SFVA) is an additional optional service, where the CP can request an engineer-appointed visit to the end customer premises where, following a complaint from the end customer the CP has a line test which has proven that the service is working correctly, and the CP wants to investigate the end customer’s concerns further.

SFVA is a chargeable service and as part of a SFVA request, the Openreach engineer will investigate whether there is any issue with the Openreach service and may carry out any or all of the following procedures:

• Check ONT is powered up on arrival
• Check that ONT is working by checking that the Optical/PON LED is Green (‘Sync’ light on ONT is steady showing connectivity) and that the PC/Router is connected to the correct port.
• Check for light on the ONT and that levels are within range.

·         Physical visual inspection of the in-home cabling from ONT to CSP

• Check ONT details are correct against our system records
  Connect to a high availability webpage, if made available, from your router using their PC

·         A visual inspection of the home environment to understand and advise if equipment positioning could be causing poor connection quality e.g., is the router in the best location.

·         Physical visual inspection of external cabling, CSP to CBT if possible.

·         Swap out ONT if necessary to support fault finding

• Liaise with the CPs’ engineer on-site, if required. It’s the CPs’ responsibility to arrange for the engineer to arrive within the appointment slot. The CP must provide us with the engineer’s contact details at the time of placing the order.

Please note that:

• Before a CP orders SFVA, the CP must have tested the service via dialogue services and received a Line Test OK result. Openreach also recommend that an Openreach Speed Test is run prior to raising an SFVA.
• SFVA is chargeable other than in these conditions:
  • The CP cancels prior to the Point of no Return (PONR)
  • Openreach through further diagnostic assessment determines that there is a fault on the Openreach network.

ONT Serial Number Mismatches can sometimes occur, this is when the Openreach recorded ONT details do not match the actual ONT installed at the end customer premises.

CPs will be given the ability to mark a GEA-FTTP/FVA fault as an ONT Mismatch and to provide the correct ONT serial number. Openreach will direct the fault to a desk agent who will correct the records without the need for an engineer visit.  If after correcting the ONT Serial Number there is still a fault present, the agent will progress to a field engineer, updating the fault as necessary.

CPs should complete a service test on the line. If the agent suspects an ONT Serial Number Mismatch, they should check the eMLC and determine the serial number we have listed for the service. They should then ask the customer to confirm the serial number of the ONT in the premises. If the numbers are different, and if the service test result is OK (Pass) and the Outcome Code is GTC_FTTP_Service_1010 (ONT Port Operational Down), or GTC_FTTP_Service_0000, or GTC_FTTP_Service_1006 CPs should use the following method to submit the fault for ONT Serial Number Mismatch.

Fault type (test product) – FTTP3/FVA3 (Visit Assure) test product as the service test is OK (Pass).

·         The Short Description/Fault Title/Customer Problem: ONT Mismatch.

·         Fault Details/Long Description: Additional CP notes can be provided but we request that the CP provides CP Recorded ONT Serial Number (from the end customer premises) and Openreach ONT Serial Number (from eMLC). e.g. (CP) ONT: 48575443403C8895 / (OR) ONT: 48575443403AZ495 / Contact No: 01234567890

·         CPs to book appointment of Day + 2 to ensure enough time of desk team to react on the fallouts.

·         Based on the above, Openreach systems will direct to our desk agents who will amend the ONT Serial Number in the records to enable service.

·         If this has resolved the issue, the agent will close the fault with a non-chargeable clear code.

·         If the service appears to still not to be working once these actions are completed, the agent will update the fault and progress the fault for a field engineer visit.

Raise an FTTP 1 fault

Proactive incident management

When the fault is reported because of a wider incident, we will append the fault report to the incident and combine the appointments for all the faults on the same network component so that we only send one engineer to the location to resolve the issue.  You will be able to track the progress of the incident through the incident ID which we will provide in the fault KCIs.

For GEA-FTTP, our proactive network monitoring will currently raise an incident when we receive and kick-off investigations for alarms in the network up to the PON.  However, we are currently also trialing the incident management capability for alarms at the CBT as well so you may experience our incident management process more frequently as this trial is expanded across our footprint. 

Here is the process we follow when we receive faults associated with an incident:

If the service test has any issues with operating, for example if it times out before obtaining necessary data from one of its source systems, you should first attempt to re-run the test.  If after a second test you are still unable to obtain a definitive test result, you may proceed to request a further investigation from our diagnostics team.

Where this occurs, the service test will return a main fault location as DT (Diagnostic Test), indicating a diagnostic test issue.  We will investigate the reason the test failed to run correctly, as well as checking the health of the service that encountered the test issue.

After you have entered all the relevant fault details you will be prompted with a confirmation including the fault reference.  This reference is what you should use if you have to talk to us about the issue.  Here’s what the confirmation looks like if you’ve raised the fault on the portal:

Once submitted, you will receive KCI notifications and updates.  Here is a summary of the KCIs that you might receive as we investigate and progress the fault.  You can view additional information about your fault on the Heads Up Display (HUD) tool accessible via the Openreach portal.  Speak to your service manager for assistance in setting up access to the HUD tool if needed.

Note that View my engineer (VME) messages may be issued for faults in a similar way to how they are issued for orders.  These messages are sent to you or directly to the end customer, depending on how you have configured the View my engineer capability for your products.  You can find more information about the View My Engineer messages that are triggered prior to and on the day of repair in the View My Engineer FAQ document in the How to Guides section of the Help and Support Guides page, here.

You can amend a fault via the portal or XML if you need to.  Via the portal, you access the Siebel Fault Tracker which is labelled on screen as “Track trouble report,” as pictured here:

After you’ve accessed the tool, you’ll be prompted to look up the fault that you want to amend.  If you have the fault reference you can use that, or you can search for the fault using a reference you provided or the service ID and then picking the relevant fault from a list:

After you’ve confirmed the fault that you need to amend, click the amend button where you’ll be presented with the amendable fields.  If the fault has been allocated to an engineer already, then it is past the point of amendment and only the site safety (Hazard) note amendments will be accepted by the system.  If another value needs to be amended, you’ll need to contact the service desk to help with a late amendment.

Once you’ve made the changes, you can review and submit them, go back and change or discard the amendment.

When you submit the amendment, you’ll receive a confirmation of the change on screen and an email or B2B notification depending on the setting you chose when you first raised the fault.  Be sure to click the Finish button on the confirmation screen.

Cancelling a fault

Cancelling a fault follows much the same process as amending the fault.  After selecting the appropriate fault reference, click the Cancel button, rather than the Amend button.

You will be prompted to provide a cancellation reason from the drop-down list:

And when you submit the cancellation request, you’ll receive an on-screen confirmation that it has been submitted successfully.  You’ll receive an email or KCI confirmation shortly after submitting assuming you selected to receive such notifications when you initially raised the fault.

In some situation, after we investigate and believe the fault to be resolved, we will send KCI 4150 asking you to confirm that the fault is indeed resolved.  This may be by simply re-running the service test or by contacting the end customer to confirm they are back in service.  In either case, we give you 72 hours to confirm that the issue is resolved.  If the issue is not resolved, you have the option to reject the fault closure, provide further details about the issue that remains for us to investigate the problem further.

If the issue is resolved, you can also confirm this to trigger the fault closure notification.  If you do not respond, we will assume the fault is resolved and systematically close the notification after 72 hours have elapsed.