Citizens Advice slams 'unfair' broadband compensation scheme Consumer rights charity Citizens Advice has slammed the UK's broadband compensation scheme which fails to pass on compensation to customers. Suppliers are typically paid compensation by Openreach for each day that there is a delay fixing a landline fault or setting up a new broadband or landline connection. But customers who …
Ignoramus? Have you ever tried to use the service? Clearly not or you would know what you are talking about.
CAB used to be the citizens protection, staffed by people who gave a damn, now they are just another self serving charity who act only for those people who meet their limited liberal goals.
If there are any of the old kind remaining then the are far from the citizens realm
"Consumer rights charity Citizens Advice has slammed BT's Openreach for being too slow to compensate customers."
Openreach's customers are the companies that supply broadband (and telecoms) to consumers/customers/user organisations - some of which are the people CAB helps.
Thus the issue isn't the fact that BT Openreach automatically compensates broadband suppliers/resellers - according to Ofcom overseen contractual terms, but that the broadband suppliers/resellers don't automatically pass those payments on to their customers.
So please explain how Openreach's compensation scheme is 'unfair', given it is the broadband suppliers who are not passing the compensation on?
I'm not sure I see quite how Openreach are 'inconveniencing' the broadband supplier here... it's the customer waiting for their line to be installed/moved/repaired that's actually been inconvenienced... after all they're the ones sat around waiting for an engineer to visit most of the time, taking time of from work, possibly losing money or wasting a days holiday.
In my mind that means they should be automatically compensated... and broadband suppliers should be obligated to pass on that compensation to the customer (at least 80% of it, so they at least cover any so called 'admin fees')
I see El Reg have corrected the article's title etc. changing the focus from BT Openreach to the Ofcom defined UK's Broadband Compensation Scheme, which is the focus of the CAB press release.
The CAB press release can be found here: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/how-citizens-advice-works/media/press-releases/broadband-customers-left-out-of-pocket-while-suppliers-are-compensated/
This seems to be an extension to their response (https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/about-us/policy/policy-research-topics/consumer-policy-research/consumer-surveys-consultation-responses/automatic-compensation-in-the-telecoms-market/ ) to an Ofcom consultation on automatic compensation (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/consultations-and-statements/category-2/automatic-compensation ).
BT / OpenReach were 2 days late installing my fibre broadband but did manage to get the phone line transferred across. This was a couple of years ago.
However compensation was based on either a proportion of line rental or broadband fee I forget which so got the grand total of £2 in 'compensation'.
If they'd failed on the phone line it would have been a different story apparently.
Didn't actually need the phone to work just the broadband of course. :-(
!BT / OpenReach were 2 days late installing my fibre broadband but did manage to get the phone line transferred across. This was a couple of years ago."
Lucky, you. Openreach failed on to install mine on _13_ seperate occasions over a 5 month period. The best compensation I had was moving to another ISP after getting fed up with the lies from BT and TT(*) about people coming out or having knocked on the door with noone being home, etc.
On occasion 13 (the new ISP), Openreach didn't show up. 2 phone calls later and I had an Ofcom tiger team specialist on site within 4 working hours and the job finished in 35 minutes. That beats "You'll have to rebook and wait another week" any day.
(*) Yes, I should have jumped ship earlier and in hindsight I kicked myself thoroughly.
Openreach failed on to install mine on _13_ separate occasions over a 5 month period. The best compensation I had was moving to another ISP after getting fed up with the lies from BT and TT(*) about people coming out or having knocked on the door with noone being home, etc.
I would assume that "no one home" etc. provide reasonable grounds for refusing compensation, hence it would be illuminating to see what compensation payments , if any, were actually made. Because surely, someone at BT (retail) and/or TT would have been monitoring new connections, since they can't really bill for a service that isn't connected and thus between them they lost 5 months of billing income. Similarly, at Openreach, ignoring compensation payments, 13 consecutive failed engineer visits are unrecoverable costs.
Depending on the level of compensation, I can understand TT being laid back as collecting the automatic compensation payments could well be more profitable than actually providing a service...
Depending on how long ago these events happened and whether you still have the relevant appointment references, it could be interesting to get your "new ISP" to make a request to Ofcom to investigate...
"I would assume that "no one home" etc. provide reasonable grounds for refusing compensation, "
I'll see your BTOR claims of "noone home" and challenge with CCTV clearly showing them not showing up for 24 hours either side of the claimed attendance time - or in 3 cases driving up and sitting outside, then driving off after 35 minutes without even bothering to set foot out of the van. In at least 4 cases Openreach apparently went to the right address _in the wrong town_.
TT freely admitted that BTOR hadn't shown up. They just refused to pay compensation, claiming (correctly) that their T&C absolve them of any obligation to do so (nice little earner... and something that the CAB seem unaware of)
The issue is that BTOR's system only allows 40 minutes onsite and almost zero travel time between jobs, so a contractor can never physically complete all assigned jobs on any given day.
Similarly they only get paid for _fixed_ faults, so there's a strong incentive to sign things off as repaired when they're not.
Unfortunately for BTOR, I happened to be recording the tech saying "It's not fixed but I've done the best I can" when he signed it off as repaired - which makes fraud claims that much easier to pursue when you give such recordings to the telco/ISP.
"I would assume that "no one home" etc. provide reasonable grounds for refusing compensation"
You'd assume that, but when there's CCTV recorded evidence showing they didn't bother showing up, you'd assume wrong.
Not to mention the BTOR linesman who turned up and sat outside for 20 minutes (under the CCTV camera) before driving off without setting foot outside the van, or the one who came in to "fix your broadband fault" and then went and sat in his van for an hour before driving off when he realised it was supposed to be an installation. Or the one who showed up to discover that none of the preparatory work had been done, so went off to do it and never came back.
Conversations with various people indicate that Openreach don't pay people for travelling between jobs or allocate enough time for travel, resulting in contractors dumping jobs they can't get to - pulling the "noone was home" stunt means they get paid - they're "independent contractors" paid per job (even though prohibited from working for anyone except Openreach)
This is all familiar stuff - and it's worth noting that the same thing was happening in New Zealand when the telco there ran a BT/Openreach pseudo-separation model in the hope of staving off government intervention - it stopped cold when their version of Openreach was fully separated into a separate company and the newly independent lines company had a significant commercial interest in not pissing off their customers (the other telcos). It transformed into a rapidly responding company overnight and the effect of real "level playing field" access has had a galvanising effect on the NZ market. (For starters there's no more incumbent telco double dipping by insisting that their equipment is used on data tail circuits, etc and that alone is hundreds per month, per connection in operating cost reductions for ISPs)
As for TalkTalk - as there was an existing ADSL connection they were being paid and LLU means they make more from ADSL2 services than VDSL2, so there's no incentive for them to sort the issue out. By making customers wait, this strings out the higher income and the wait period is just long enough to dissuade switching to another provider thanks to the mandatory 14 day delay involved in changeovers.
In any case they did try to bill for non-existent VDSL services.
"Companies are paid every time a broadband or landline repair or installation is delayed. But customers who bear the brunt of these problems have to fight for compensation from their broadband company – and may not get any."
The group is calling for this disparity to be addressed in The Digital Economy Bill, currently passing through the House of Lords.
MP: "What's next?"
MP: "The Serf want compensation every time their ISP fails in some technical manner."
MP: "All those in favour?"
[silence...]
This post has been deleted by its author
Downvote for the person without a clue. What would happen is that prices will rise enormously to cover these payments.
Yes you are right that making it more painful would improve matters - but it would not eliminate issues. Given that the payments for the remaining issues would be large, the profits needed to pay for those payments would need to be appropriately increased - and that means higher bills for everyone.
Of course, higher bills for everyone would leads to complains that people were being fleeced ...
The thing to remember is that, relatively speaking, we mostly get very cheap internet. You can of course have an internet service where there is a guaranteed fix time, with significant penalties for it being down. Lots of businesses (including my employer and many of our customers) have such services. Service Level Agreements can be as good as "four hours to fix a fault". Depending on where you are and how much speed you want, such a service may take a few months to install, cost you a 5 figure sum in excess construction charges, and then cost you hundreds or thousands a month.
"The thing to remember is that, relatively speaking, we mostly get very cheap internet."
Compared to the USA yes - but the USA has legislated local monopolies and zero competition across most of the country. Most people have a choice of _one_ supplier for Internet (DSL or cable, few areas where they overlap and virtually nothing else)
Compared to other countries which supposedly have competition in the market our prices are high and speeds are low.
For each & every day the service is not connected/working as contracted, the customer gets a thousand Quid. Each & every customer who has just had their service killed off by some putz that "accidentlly" cuts a fiber, a thousand Quid apiece every day until service is restored. Line tech doesn't show up for four days to hook up your service? You just got four thousand Quid richer.
And as well as massively pushing up prices, as has already been pointed out, a compensation regime which vastly exceeds customer's losses would encourage customers to game the system. If I can get a thousand quid just by persuading my connection to "accidentally" break, then that sure beats working for a living.
"...a compensation regime which vastly exceeds customer's losses would encourage customers to game the system."
Equally a 'too cheap' compensation scheme encourages Openreach to game the system, which in my experience over several faults, is exactly what they do. The last and worst of my faults took 13 bookings to achieve 6 actual appointments to resolve the fault, with 3 of the ones 'attended' being work at the exchange or conduits that didn't actually involve me; so 7 complete no shows and 10 half days in total I could have been doing something more useful than twiddling my thumbs waiting for an engineer to turn up. A compensation payment sufficient to deter Openreach from using me as a unpaid buffer to optimise their rota seems reasonable; since it definitely did inconvenience me, it seems reasonable enough the payment is direct to me.
IIRC back in the late 80's BT had a scheme imposed on them. For every day over 24 hours from a fault being reported, the customer got something like 4 quid - not much, but it must have been enough because their previously diabolical repair and installation times miraculously shrank within a year or so, to the point a payout was rare. For the ISP a missed Openreach appointment is just part of the cost of doing business, for the end user its usually a considerable inconvenience.
CAB are pretty good... however their resources are stretched so thin that it can be next to impossible to actually get help from them. They closed the office in my town so any one who wants help now has a 15 mile round trip to make to their nearest offices that are open just a few hrs a week.
I've found it much easier to search/ask for help/advice via the consumer action group forums.
http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/
Sorry for taking us a little bit off topic, but the issue here isn't just compensation when parts of the nation's communications infrastructure fall down in a dysfunctional tangle [although that's frustrating enough].
Another one of the issues concerns their misleading malpractice when it comes to handling line speeds. We've all seen the advertisements offering speeds of "up to" 45Mb/s or "up to" 75Mb/s and so on, only to end up with actual line speeds that are 1) nothing like as good; or 2) prove to be unreliable...
So how about OfCom introduce a new and simple rule that says: "If a telco wants to charge a unit price for a 45Mb/s service, but can only offer a slower speed, then the maximum price they are allowed to charge has to be pinned to the (percentage) ratio of the actual speed to the claimed speed."
Or to put it in simple terms: If a telco offered you a 45Mb/s service for say £20/month, but then only managed to provide half the speed [22.5Mb/s] then the maximum they can charge you for the service is £10/month.
One of the reasons that this would be a good idea would be that it would give the telco companies the necessary incentive to deal with degrading and/or poor quality lines, because the slower the modem speed at the client, the lower the income for the telco...
Ultimately, the reason most of us get such shoddy service from the telco companies is because the regulator lets them get away with it.
Ultimately, the reason most of us get such shoddy service from the telco companies is because the regulator lets them get away with it.
I'm not sure that Ofcom does get paid for that bit of regulation. OTOH the Advertising Standards Authority does, and IIRC it is taking up the issue of the smoke and mirrors surrounding download speeds, with a decision coming sometime in Q1/2 2017.
It will be interesting to see what actually happens...
As an aside shoddy service is not limited to the telcos, but that's another whole library of stories.
"The ASA are a worse joke though."
Like the premium rate "regulator" they're a trade association which until about a decade ago only existed to give the illusion of industry self-regulation and avoid government intervention. They are not regulators in any legal sense.
The Internet changed that and scams abound. both groups started getting their feet held to the fire and didn't like it - threatening to refuse complaints from people who stated they were tracking performance resulted in real regulators starting to look over their shoulders and not being impressed.
The changes in responsiveness from both since 2004 have been a direct result of being told "if you don't do a satisfactory job self regulating, WE WILL" - and of course represent the absolute minimum effort to keep government regulators out.
The fun part is that FOI law states that organisations delegated responsiblity from government bodes or performing a role which would otherwise be performed by government agencies are subject to FOI coverage - Both the ASA and PPP (or whatever it's calling itself this week) have been resisting FOI requests and that could still result in independent government regulators stepping in.
"OTOH the Advertising Standards Authority does"
The ASA is a private association, with voluntary membership and _zero_ legal powers.
Even the bits which have been delegated to them mean that anyone who sticks 2 fingers up to the "fines" or "findings" can only be referred on to trading standards.
They've been been documented refusing to take complaints from anyone keeping stats on them.
Then we go back to the days of a few set speeds like when we could choose 512k, 1MB or 2MB, granted I'd hope for the most part we could better those speeds these days, but I'm pretty sure people who are sold lets say 15MB but see the line sync at 17 or 20 MB will be unhappy. Regardless of the speed delivered the cost to provide ADSL broadband is pretty much the same if you get 256k or 20MB, similarly with VDSL cost is the same regardless of actual speed delivered. So the only way for that to work would be to charge everyone the same as now but then increase price regardless of actual cost to deliver.
Would you like to pay 4x the cost to go from 20MB VDSL to 80MB VDSL regardless of the fact the cost for the ISP to deliver is the same and would you like to be stuck on set values and lose out on the line sync speed?
If Openreach have failed to deliver something to you, you don't complain to them - you complain to your ISP that your have your contract with.
Your ISP has to pay somebody to answer your call, apologize for the f'up, sort out another engineer if needed - all stuff entirely out of their control and directly the fault of Openreach..
Yes, it's annoying that you've been messed about and don't have your broadband - but it's not actually costing you money to complain, unlike it does for your ISP to answer.
Now my all means try to get your ISP to give you something for the inconvenience, but you're not entitled to all of what Openreach paid them.
Your ISP has to pay somebody to answer your call, apologize for the f'up, sort out another engineer if needed...
Now my all means try to get your ISP to give you something for the inconvenience, but you're not entitled to all of what Openreach paid them.
Right and wrong in that order, IMHO. If your ISP buys from BT and then sells on to you they are buying at wholesale rates and selling on to you at retail rates. If all goes well then the difference is "profit"; if it doesn't then the costs of putting things right has to come from their mark - up.
If your BB service fails then it is you that is being inconvenienced; your ISP should meet the costs of putting things right. They should not pocket any part of any compensation paid to them by BT.
A while back I had to wait over two damned weeks for a known FttC (VDSL2) multiple dead port fault in the street cabinet, affecting several houses, to be fixed because of the fracking irrelevant ADSL/Phone TT Indian call centre scripts and fracking BT red-tape/inflexibility caused delays, but received zero compensation or refund for loss of service, the cnuts! Stuff like this should be fixed in a day if staff available and not require multiple pointless visits!
" fracking irrelevant ADSL/Phone TT Indian call centre scripts and fracking BT red-tape/inflexibility caused delays"
Yup. The good news is that you can go to another ISP on 14 days notice and for about 5% more than TT, get a UK helpdesk, UK techs and a supplier who won't put up with shit from BTOR.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
