4th Utility, gesture of goodwill

From 4th Utility:

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Dear 4th Utility Customer,

We would like to apologise to our customers and thank them for their patience during the internet and VoIP outage experienced at the Barbican Estate.

Our immediate focus was concentrated on replacing centralised equipment and routers in customer homes, working around the clock to get them back online as quickly as possible. We're very pleased to say this work is now complete, aside from customers who are away.

We're sorry and want to offer a good will gesture

As a gesture of good will for the inconvenience this has caused, we are going to credit your account 70% of your monthly rental which will appear as a credit in the next 5-10 working days and will see a reduced payment in your December or January invoice.

Given that we had the new central kit providing service to the estate and a significant proportion of customers back online all within 2 working days of the outage, with CPE available on site for all other customers to take up, we believe the above offer is reasonable and exceeds a simple pro-rata refund of your monthly subscription.

In addition, we will be providing a donation to 'The Barbican Centre Trust' of £2000, on behalf of the Barbican residents.

What happened?

After our acquisition of VFM earlier this year, upgrading the infrastructure at the Barbican Estate was always part of our longer-term improvement programme. Our intention was to bring the equipment into line with our own standard build, which offers improved remote diagnostics, speed of upgrades, and advanced support capabilities, ultimately enabling us to provide a better service for customers.

During a recent scheduled maintenance window at the Barbican Estate, an unexpected hardware failure occurred. The 4th Utility team reacted quickly and had new centralised kit and 1,000 routers onsite within 4 hours of the outage. Staff were also deployed to site quickly to answer customer questions, distribute equipment, and assist with installations.

Could this occur again?

This hardware failure means that the migration on to new equipment in line with our improvement programme has been accelerated for the Barbican Estate. The expedited migration also led to a discovery of further possible site and service enhancements that will now be built into our ongoing development plans.

Now that the new infrastructure is in place, we will be able to offer our customers a better, fully supported service and because the build is more modular, future risks are minimised. As a result of this work, we are confident that any future issues will only have a marginal impact and will be straightforward to manage and resolve quickly. Because of the steps we have taken over the last few days, we do not anticipate the same level of disruption happening again.

If you have any questions or would like any further technical information, please contact us via support@4thu.co.uk and one of our technical or executive team will be happy to respond, over the phone or via email. We know how vital broadband connectivity is for all of our customers, and that's why it's important to us that the quality of our products and services is always high. Thank you again for your patience and for sticking with us.



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