Cancel broadband without fees? ‘Reasonable’ to assume it’s a PR stunt

In Consumeractive you often mention how infuriating the word “reasonable” is. You rightly say that it appears too many times in law, leading to confusion and ambiguity. What’s reasonable to the retailer may, for example, be unreasonable to the customer (and vice versa of course).

That’s why I wasn’t jumping for joy after reading your news story in Issue 556 (page 9) about broadband providers “promising” to let customers cancel without a fee if they can’t fix problems. It sounds good, but read on and you’ll notice they’ve given themselves a get-out clause: they’ve got a “reasonable” time to fix these problems. How long will this be? Weeks? Months? I’m willing to bet it won’t be hours or days.

Don’t be fooled by this commitment from broadband companies. The reason they came up with it voluntarily is to avoid Ofcom imposing harsher penalties. It smacks of a PR stunt designed to win positive headlines that are quickly forgotten. It’s meant to reassure customers that the companies are on their side, but doesn’t actually mean anything.

Many years ago, I worked for a company that used what I thought were disreputable marketing practices. Whenever I questioned these policies the company’s lawyers said they could justify it by squeezing the word “reasonable” into the small print. I soon left the company, which later went bankrupt, as I had expected. You can’t build a sustainable company on such dodgy foundations.

Broadband companies won’t go bust, but they do risk losing the trust of the public if they make bold claims about refunds, then backtrack using the “reasonable” excuse. The problem is, they’ve all made this empty promise, so you can’t switch to another firm whose commitments hold more weight.

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