Openreach out of reach for farmer

Larne hill farmer Campbell Tweed has outlined his frustration with Openreach, a division of BT, and the company tasked with maintaining the national telephone and broadband network.

His problem relates back to the end of last month when during preparations for an event at his farm organised by the local motor club, the overhead line to his house was damaged.

The cable was temporarily fixed by the local club, and a call logged with Openreach who came out to fix the cable the following week. But, according to Tweed, rather than use a four-core cable, the engineer replaced it with a two-core cable, leaving him with a phone line, but without fax or broadband access.

Despite repeated attempts to contact the company, the fault is still to be repaired. “I have had no broadband since 26 March, and it looks like it will be 16 April at the earliest before it is resolved. So much for the department telling farmers to do everything online. I have tried contacting Openreach, but all you get is an answer machine directing you to their website. Openreach – more like out of reach,” said Tweed.

DAERA makes U-turn on calf registrations

Plans by DAERA to phase out paper-based registration of newborn calves, starting from May 2018, have been shelved, following lobbying by the Ulster Farmers’ Union (UFU).

With 30% of calves registered using a paper MC1 form, the union maintained that starting to phase out paper forms from next month was too ambitious, especially given the poor broadband coverage in many rural areas and that many farmers are not computer literate. “While paper notifications will continue to be accepted, the UFU will continue to support the DAERA campaign for those farmers who wish to move from paper notifications to the online and telephone options,” said UFU president Barclay Bell.