Council Chairman Alex Baird has suggested that the call centre in Enniskillen deal with the complainst of local BT customers
ALREADY forced to contend with having little or no mobile phone signal, people in the Springfield and Monea area have had to cope without the BT phone line and internet service being cut off.
Due to the stormy weather as many as a hundred homes in the area have had their phone and internet connections affected by faults in the past week. In fact some have had no connection of any kind since Thursday.
Council chairman and UUP councillor Alex Baird explained how he was without a working phone line and internet connection for three days last week from Thursday through until Sunday.
“My phoneline was out of service which meant I may have missed important calls and my Internet was down, which meant as a council representative difficulties getting emails and of course I couldn’t get on to facebook.”
He also highlighted the problems faced by his mother-in-law who lives in Monea and is already forced to contend with another communication problem.
“Where my mother-in-law lives there is no mobile phone signal, she was completely cut off, which was a worry especially had there been an emergency.
“Immediate contact is what we’re used to and once it is broken difficulties arise.”
Mr Baird expressed his frustration in contacting BT to rectify the issue and highlighted the problem of a lack of a local accountable service to deal with these complaints.
“When I rang up I got through to someone from New Dehli and had to wait 15 minutes, while others have waited longer.
“For me as a public representative there was no way of getting in touch with BT to say this is an area fault, not just an Alex Baird fault, there is a call centre in Enniskillen, I don’t see why we have to go through to New Dehli.”
“What we need is a locally accountable service. I’m going to BT about this to express my concerns because there is nobody locally accountable in Northern Ireland especially outside working hours.”
A spokesman from BT confirmed that cable damage from the bad weather had affected homes served by the Springfield exchange and that Fermanagh was one of the main affected areas by the service problems which have affected over 3,000 homes across the North
“The current severe weather conditions have impacted heavily on our service, and fault levels right across Northern Ireland increased significantly.
“Thousands of faults have already been repaired and our teams are continuing to make excellent progress in minimising further disruption.
“While the number of newly reported faults has reduced, significant resources are still required to work through the high volume of outstanding issues, many of which are complex.
“Repair work to damaged poles and cables in the Springfield exchange area has now been completed and service is being restored to all affected customers.”
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