Impossible to contact. Everything has to go through the service provider, making communication slower and even more error prone. Appointment system designed to make things easy for OpenReach, not for end users who have to waste more than half a day every time waiting around for an engineer who may or may not turn up. Compensation for missed appointments insulting. When they do turn up, they inevitably spend the first hour or more trying to find faults in things the consumer side of the master socket, even when it is blatantly obvious that the problem is the OpenReach side of the socket. Multiple households in our village recently had the same issue, which was caused by a fault near the exchange. That didn't stop OpenReach wasting time at each house, ignoring information from residents that the problem had already been confirmed as near the exchange. We've had the same engineer turn up twice in the space of a month (we had three appointments in quick succession). The first time, he checked the house and said everything in the house was fine. That didn't stop him checking again when he returned for another appointment, during which he screwed up our wiring completely. Almost without exception the engineers are mediocre or worse (not just the ones that have come recently), with minimal soft skills, minimal technical skills and minimal diagnostic skills. Open a box, disconnect wires and then, by trial-and-error, try to hook them up to get things working again. In our latest experience, they disconnected multiple extensions, including the burglar alarm, and only put one back in place. Even that one was put back using a different pair of wires, changing the extension from pretty much crystal clear to crackly. The engineer arrived without suitable tools, so had to borrow them. He scooped some of them up into his bag, from which they had to be retrieved before he left. He spent the appointment muttering about how he wasn't trained for things, yet still took things apart to try to do them (making the situation worse). He couldn't explain what he was doing, nor what he had done. The previous engineer wasn't quite as bad, but still left things in a worse situation than when he arrived, including disconnecting the master socket that OpenReach insist must be present, making it just a junction box. Three visits in a row, engineers have looked at a frayed cable outside (OpenReach's responsibility) and have left it there rather than replace it. I have not yet seen an OpenReach engineer take a photograph of wiring before making changes, so they inevitably cannot put things back how they were when they get into trouble. That last one messed things up so badly, including the consumer side of the master socket, that he reckoned we would have to get somebody in the lay new extension cables, and redecorate as the cables are in the walls. I cannot think of a company as appalling as OpenReach, and I despair any time we have to deal with them. The moment reliable 5G is available where we are, our landlines will be history just to get rid of the need to deal with OpenReach ever again. Their monopoly in this area needs to be gotten rid of, so that people who know what they are doing can compete and improve things. As it is, we have complaints and a compensation claim open against OpenReach. Were it not for the fact that FTTP is due to be installed soon, which will require changes to our home setup anyway, I would be kicking up one hell of a stink.