Talk Talk wholesale dragging their heels

The new "Notice of Transfer" system has a deadline of Saturday!

We, as an ISP, and all other ISPs, have to have the new system in place by then.

A key part is sending notices to end users, and for that to work we have to receive the details from the carriers. In our case we deal with BT plc t/a BT Wholesale, and Talk Talk business. We also deal with BT plc t/a Openreach, but that did not actually need any real work as the system for phone lines is not really changing.

Oddly, I see nothing in the OFCOM rules that say that the carriers have to send ISPs like us any notices. It is all about ISPs sending end users notices. But, none the less, we expect to get the details from these carriers in order to comply.

BT Wholesale have several systems in place, and we coded using one (BBCR) before realising that a different system would be better. We have now coding our system to work with BT's B2B XML SOAP updates for unsolicited orders. It was a slight pain as all of the forums we went to implied that we would just get these updates, but in practice they had to be turned on, and that took a few days to sort. However, it was done, and was not even the only way to get the information. Well done BT and especially John who is looking after this whole thing.

Unfortunately Talk Talk are dragging their heels. They have an FTP site from which we can get files containing details of orders, including these unsolicited orders. However, for the new system they have a new format and new files with new fields.

We were told about this months ago (well done) and were told we would have to ask to be changed to the new format (which we did). Nothing happened.

Weeks ago we asked again as it was getting urgent. We were told there was a 5 day SLA, but that ran out last week, and still nothing.

We are chasing several times every day this week, and now we have under 48 hours for it to go live and STILL it has not happened.

This is taking the piss, and it was a toss up whether blogging about it would kick their arse more quickly than complaining to OFCOM. I chose the blog route, but if we have nothing by tomorrow it is calls to OFCOM that will follow. Sorry to do this to you guys, but what other choice do I have?

P.S. OFCOM have been contacted now.