Lost broadband service is becoming as serious as lost electicity supply

If you report that your electricity has failed, your electricity supplier will respond pretty quickly - 24/7. They will look into the fault, and carry on their analysis until they have found the fault, then they will fix it, then they will check that the problem is cleared. It's not uncommon to find them digging up a pavement in the middle of the night to get the supply restored.

Now contrast this with loss of Broadband service for the many of us who have are outside cable-TV areas, on exchanges where only BT have any equipment. As I write this, several neighbours have been without Broadband for over a week. They have different kit on the end of their phone lines. They are on different cables from the exchange. Their phones work but their Broadband doesn't. BT's response has been to send engineers to homes, and in one case to send them a new router. You or I might conclude that this is a problem at the exchange and hope that BT were pretty adept at testing and fixing their own kit on their own premises. But still the problem isn't fixed.

As the internet has grown, so more and more activities and services have first had an internet option added, and then had the non-internet options removed. Without internet, you can't make or change a booking on some airlines. Your kids can't do their homework (which increasingly assumes internet access). You can't even check your BT bill (unless you have opted to pay them extra for a paper bill).

But as the internet has become more crucial, nothing has been done to adjust BT's service obligation to reflect this. This needs fixing urgently - but with a toothless Ofcom and an anti-intervention government, what hope do we have?