Some consolation to know we're not alone

Question

Finding these forums at least gives us some consolation that we are not alone with the problems we are experiencing. Our 93 yo mother lives alone and tries to be fiercely independent. She lost her service last month and it took a week of calls from my sister and I to eventually have it comfirmed as a welfare case and an engineer to come and make a repair to the junction box on the pole about 200 metres from the house.
Within a month we have had to report the line dead again. Once again we have had to chase things again and again. On neither occasion were we informed of the Priority Fault scheme until last night when my sister received a call from a senior manager at customer care after we had discussed our concerns with OFCOM, who although they said it was outside of their remit were willing to try and get some answers from BT. This call at least explained the nature of the major fault, the time delay in receiving planning permission to dig up the road and provide traffic lights etc.
We had previously explained that our mothers call alarm was literally her lifeline as she falls on a reasonably frequent basis, and there is no mobile coverage from any network at her property. We have had to now resort to hiring a carer to stay with her as it's not possible for either of us to commit the unknown amount of time to be there for her. She can't cope with the stairs at either of our houses.
It's disingenuous for the mods on here to say BT are at the mercy of Openreach when OR are a BT Group company and if they don't have the capacity to keep the BT network in good order in a timeous manner then the BT Group needs to address that. It's surely a red herring to say other providers have to be treated equally when all they are doing is renting the BT network.
The fault reporting and updating website is worse than useless when there is no facility for interaction once the fault has been actioned. Seeing it updated each day with a "will be fixed by 2359" means nothing at all when that doesn't happen.
We are now trying to approach our MP's to see if anybody can explain why BT/Openreach do not have a statutory obligation, as the other utilities do, to restore service within a set time period. Profit over people is my observation.
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Answer 1

Sorry to hear you are having such problems - hope you get somewhere with your MP. I don't understand how BT manage to have a monopoly on the phone lines and manage to mess them up so badly all the time. In our very tiny village Openreach are here on a daily basis, as they manage to fix one phone line (average time of 2 weeks) another persons line goes out (we are thinking of having a sweepstake for who is next in line!!). It is impossible to get any answers as to when the fault will be fixed or what the problem is (I did get an interesting call from India telling me it was due to the exptreme weather we had in our area - when we were very lucky and did not actually have any problems with the weather at all!!!)
Our problems are compounded by the fact that we also have very poor mobile reception - which BT don't seem to beleive, I would like to see them come here and try and use their mobile phones, it is just about impossible!
Anyhow, today was the day my line was going to be fixed by.....of course it isn't.
Mind you I am most confused (and BT won't reply to the question) but how come I have broadband but no phone when they use the same line??????