Giganet ELITE (Leased Line) Engineering Visits

What Site Visits Are Possible?

As standard, there will be a physical survey visit before the planning work is complete and any charges have been agreed. Once your order is in the build phase Openreach may need to arrange site access with your primary contact, and they will prefer if your primary contact is on site and available to help them when they book this in with you. The type of visits that may be required could be:

1. Site surveys.
2. Rod and tube visits – to check the health of the existing ducting leading into the premises.
3. Internal and external visits, either with Openreach or their contractors, to install or fix access infrastructure the nearest node and the termination point in the building.
4. Fibre jointing and equipment installation and test visits. These can include blowing and splicing the fibre, installing network termination equipment and carrying out circuit tests).

How Are Site Visits Arranged?

There are different ways that Openreach might decide to organise these visits, but usually they will contact us first and we will contact your primary contact to ensure the proposed date is suitable. 

Openreach try to provide at least two working days’ notice from their first attempt to contact to arrange the visit. Sometimes, if there are cancellations on other orders, they may call with a shorter notice to see if it would be suitable for you.

If an appointment has been arranged with a longer notice period, Openreach may try to call nearer to the time to check that the person they’re meeting with is aware and ready for their visit. If they’re not then they will try to rearrange. 

What Happens On The Day Of The Visit?

On the day of an appointment usually the engineer that is visiting will ring ahead to provide more precise information about the visit, including any pre work the engineer will need to do before visiting them on site. If the primary contact doesn’t answer at this point, they will leave a message (if applicable) and proceed with the pre work. They will try to then visit the site and get access, if there are any issues then they will escalate to primary and secondary contacts. Depending on the results of the calls the engineer will wait as long as they can, this will be at least 15 minutes, to avoid cancelling the appointment. If they have to leave and the appointment is cancelled then they will need to rearrange. For missed appointments there will be abortive visit charges which you, as the end customer, would be liable for.

Please be aware that on some occasions the engineer may turn up without calling ahead within the allocated time slot. 

Time slots are AM or PM. AM usually means that the engineer can turn up anytime between 8.00 to 13.00. PM usually means that the engineer can turn up anytime between 13.00 to 18.00. 

What If An Appointment Is Missed?

On rare occasions there may be an issue with the Openreach engineer completing the visit, this could be due to another appointment overrunning, engineer illness or if the engineer has an accident. In these circumstances Openreach try to assign an alternative engineer to the appointment but this isn’t always possible. In this scenario they will issue a ‘missed appointment’ notification to us and will rearrange the appointment.

If the appointment has been missed due to the end customer not being available or prevents the appointment from being completed, then you would be liable for a missed appointment charge to cover the engineers time. 

Please also be aware that Openreach will fail appointments if there is only a minor present at the premises, again, you would be liable for an abortive visit charge in these circumstances.