Fair Isle folk unhappy at BT’s response to broadband fault

A Fair Isle resident has lodged a complaint against BT, claiming the company failed to treat a problem with the island’s internet connection seriously.

The connection went down on Tuesday, but Angela Wiseman said at first the company told residents there was no problem with the connection – then told her it would take almost a week to reconnect the island.

Mrs Wiseman said: “On Tuesday it went down, there was a fault in the exchange and about 14 or 15 Fair Isle folk called up to complain.

“Out of that 14 only I got any seriousness out of BT, they fobbed everyone else off and told them there was nothing wrong with the internet connection.”

She persevered, however, and eventually BT told her the connection had been repaired it but would need to send an engineer to the isle to reconnect customers’ broadband.

Mrs Wiseman said the situation was “stupid”. “It’s beyond a joke. The likes of myself, I need the internet to work, the nurse house needs it, the school – Dave [Wheeler] is having to do the weather by phone.”

Mrs Wiseman said she had challenged BT as to why the island community had to wait until Monday to get the engineer out, and was told there was no room on the plane before that, which she said was “complete rubbish”.

She said it was particularly galling given the community’s support of the recent BT Infinity campaign, which encouraged customers to register their support for super fast connection speeds.

“Every single family signed up to the campaign, we were the first place to get the 75 per cent. It’s a real slap in the face.”

A spokesman for BT said: “Originally we just had one broadband fault reported on Fair Isle and when we tried to get an engineer across on Friday’s flight, we discovered he could not get a return flight until Monday, so we decided it was best for him make the round trip on Monday.

“Since then two more people on Fair Isle have complained that their internet is running slowly, which indicates it could be a common fault, and we are currently trying to see if we can resolve this problem remotely.”