TELECOMS companies are becoming increasingly concerned that the year-old system for ensuring “equivalence” of access to BT’s network is fundamentally flawed, and needs to undergo a significant revision.

Industry bosses are frustrated and angry with the problems they encounter when dealing with BT Openreach, a new, semi-autonomous division that is meant to prevent BT from having privileged use of the nation’s telecoms network.

Fault rates and repair times are said to have quadrupled, making it more difficult for BT’s rivals to service their own customers. Openreach is at the heart of new broadband services being rolled out by the likes of Talk Talk and Tiscali.

“Currently we are experiencing the worst service ever from BT,” complained one senior executive this weekend.

On Thursday, Openreach organised a webcast to try to reassure 150 of the telecoms companies that rely on it that it recognised the scale of the problems and was committed to resolving them. However, this has failed to placate the critics.

One said: “Circuit faults have increased by threefold or fourfold and time to repair has quadrupled. We do not have confidence the management in Openreach understands the extent of the problems and has a grasp on an action plan to remedy the situation.”

Phil Metcalf, UK managing director of Global Crossing, said: “We have not seen anything improve. Some people within BT are very disappointed with the way it’s going.”

Emma Gilthorpe, Openreach director of equivalence, said the problems were partly due to the scale of demand for broadband. Openreach had asked many of its 24,000 engineers to work overtime, but there was a lag in matching resources to demand.