THE 388 STORY

Michael Trend disentangles

a case history of failure by British Telecom

FOLLOWING the appearance of an article, 'British Telecom's number is up' (Spectator, 4 July) my life has been like that of Coleridge's wedding-guest: con- stantly being stopped by ancient mariners of the telecommunications world; I 'cannot Choose but hear'. Everybody seems to have their own particular BT horror story. One case in particular seemed worthy of following up more closely — that of the Euston (388) exchange — because a 'users' committee' of over 100 was set up there and has compiled a substantial case file detailing at least part of what has been a very difficult year so far for a large number of businesses, banks, insurance companies, building societies, the Grafton Hotel, the Marie Stapes clinic and various private individuals. Its evidence cannot be dismis- sed as 'anecdotal', as BT has done in past cases. It is an especially useful case history because it bears out in some detail the Observations made in the earlier article about some of the weaknesses of BT's management: a tendency to take the cus- tomer for granted, evasion of specific matters raised with them, lack of control over the quality of engineers' work, bad forward planning, lack of decisiveness and a poor internal structure of accountability.

The real trouble with the 388 exchange began when BT installed a new Digital X System in late November and early Decem- ber last year. (It is a similar installation to the 405 exchange which has caused the Spectator's difficulties.) Problems were im- mediately obvious to some of the users; they were, chiefly, difficulty with outgoing calls, constant engaged tones, and the sound of a ringing tone for incoming callers even though the line was not connected. And for three days one local firm could hear down one of its lines nothing but William Hill's continuous racing commen- tary.

One of the remarkable features of this case is the large number of people who did not realise — sometimes for months— that there was a special problem at all. Many put the constant difficulties down to the level of inefficiency they had come to take for granted from their telephone; and subscribers in private houses whom I talked to made the point that they had not wanted to complain about the problems because, in their experience, a visit from the engineers often made the problem worse or because they feared they would be cut off altogether as an act of 'revenge' by BT. Having seen quite a lot of British Telecom's engineering staff and their work in the past week, I quite sympathised with the first point while finding the second unreasonable, although it was very reveal- ing that people thought and spoke in those terms.

Michael Silverman, the senior partner of Merton Associates, a management consult- ancy firm in the Euston area, has, howev- er, treated his problems with BT in a proper businesslike manner and from his experiences a more accurate picture can be built up. By mid-January Mr Silverman had begun to despair of the advertised ways of getting his telephone put right and 'as a last resort' wrote to Mr I.D.T.

'If England is two nations, how come we've ended up in the wrong one?' Valiance, BT's Managing Director Local Communications Services. Little did he realise that this 'last resort' was but the first step in a campaign that is still going on seven months later.

Mr Silverman's letter of 14 January was replied to on 6 February by John Morris, the Acting Senior Service Manager, who said: 'I can confirm that the 388 exchange is processing calls correctly and there is no evidence of a problem at this point.' Mr Silverman had, however, gathered together a list of 24 local companies which had experienced severe difficulties with their phones being 'constantly engaged', as well as 147 complaints from his own clients who could not get through to his company. He was already beginning to be able to count his losses in tens of thousands of pounds.

As he was obviously not going to get much further with the Acting Senior Ser- vice Manager, Mr Silverman tried another tack. This time he wrote to Mr J. P. Inglis, head of BT's chairman's service office. Silverman's letter of 19 February received no reply; so he wrote again on 2 March seeking one. Three days later Mr Inglis replied saying that he had now passed on the original letter to Mr Alan Misson, the City of London's district engineer, who would deal with it. Students of office politics might suggest these opening ploys — the 'there is no problem', the non-reply, and the 'I have referred your letter to' — were classic delaying manoeuvres. In my view, they accurately give the tone of much of BT's general response to its public.

Mr Silverman was just beginning to get into his stride and, realising this, BT began to treat him more carefully. His belief was that the 388 exchange was overloaded and he had collected proof that could not be ignored. He also widened his scope at this stage to involve Professor Bryan Carsberg, the director general of Oftel. Slowly, what was wrong with the 388 exchange began to emerge. Mr Misson spoke to Silverman on 10 March saying that the problem did not relate to the new equipment being under- sized or under-rated for the job, and that all problems would be put right in ten working days. Two days later he replied to the original letter in different terms:

One of the difficulties associated with the early stages of our digital exchange mod- ernisation is that the digital exchange must exist initially in a predominantly analogue network environment. In this situation it is all too easy to underestimate the demands likely to be placed on the incoming network.

Our students of office politics may recog- nise here. the 'smoke-screen' effect; but what it meant was that BT had failed to make provision for the amount of use the system would face — thus leading to overloading.

That this was definitely the case was confirmed in the following weeks in many ways: Oftel realised that the problem was 'shortage of capacity on the 388 Euston exchange' and BT itself admitted this when it announced that it was putting in train a programme installing 79 new circuits and 12 major routes. This would be done by 24 April at the latest and all would be well again, they said. Mr Silverman also heard at this time from Michael Bett, BT's Managing Director of Inland Communica- tions, one of the company's corporate directors, saying that 'I can assure you that the augmentation of routes in Euston has the highest priority'.

But the deadline came and went; and the problems persisted. On 1 May one of Silverman's users' committee reported that the problem of the telephone ringing with- out reply had in fact got worse. And although the district engineer told Mr Silverman on 5 May that the engineering work (supposed to have been finished on 24 April) was now done, he was soon building up new evidence from his own business that things were still far from right.

Now he was introduced to the District Manager City of London, Mr Denys Ben- nett, at Riverside House just over South- wark Bridge for a 'presentation' of BT's problems and how they were tackling them. From this meeting figures were produced by BT which other specialists in the telecommunications field believed could show that up to 25 per cent of all of London's exchanges were seriously over- loaded at peak times; also the full extent of BT's lack of forward planning in the recent past became evident, although the mana- gers refused to talk about this in any detail.

In mid-May, another 388 user, Legal and General, was still receiving up to 100 complaints about their telephones every week. What was the problem now that the new hardware was in place? Mr Silverman and his colleagues were by then collecting evidence of a different type. The hardware problems may well have been masking a second area of mismanagement — in the computer software for the 388 System X. Two recent news stories might help to explain this. BT is apparently at the moment returning faulty parts in some of their System Xs to one of the manufactur- ers, GEC. The fault is said to `mistakenly give the engaged tone'. BT has also recent- ly set up a specialist unit to look into programming errors in System X. A report in the Financial Times says that 'it appears that when the exchange is under pressure the power falls off. This means that although the caller gets a ringing tone the call is not connected.' These latest de- velopments raise important new questions for the 388 exchange.

BT's Mr Bennett, who has now been given this unenviable ball to run with, has announced five further 'presentations' for this month alone, and the venue has been changed to a more attractive location, the BT tower, This is progress of a sort but a belated PR exercise will not cover the cracks that easily. For among Mr Silver- man's most recent correspondence is this 'last resort' — or opening shot? — from the Bankers Trust: 'We have written twice to the manager of the City of London district, which has produced the standard ack- nowledgment and no more'. This is where we came in. There is obviously still a long way to go.