Trust crisis
The news comes as ISPs have been hit with a flurry of fines regarding performance and customer service. Plusnet was fined £880,000 for billing former customers, while TalkTalk was forced to pay £400,00 for failing to protect customer data.
Meanwhile, BT has accepted a £42m fine for not paying the right compensation to its wholesale ISP customers, which could have driven up consumer prices at rival ISPs, skewing the market.
“Billing, technical failures and hacking are all issues, and some of them might involve a separate company that are causing these issues, but it undermines consumer trust in the whole complicated process,” said Lyndsey Burton, managing director of the choose.co.uk comparison site.
Burton also doubts whether the ISPs can be trusted with an automated compensation scheme. “The question that hangs over it is whether it’s going to make a difference to the problem or cause more reporting issues, and how will it will be monitored?” she said. “At the moment, the proposal is relying on the ISPs to report what they’re awarding consumers and there’s no system in place for Ofcom to check that.
“If they have billing errors in those systems, the billing systems are also being relied upon to correctly award the compensation.”
It’s unclear how the scheme would work for providers, which often rely on BT’s engineers and infrastructure. There are likely to be disputes over where responsibility lies for a fault.
According to Ofcom, retail providers who purchase their wholesale lines from BT’s Openreach claim provisioning dates are often missed because Openreach fails to meet the provisioning date. “The broadband value chain is complex and identifying which party is responsible for the potential fault can pose problems,” said the Broadband Stakeholder Group’s Evans.
Billing, technical failures and hacking are all issues, and some of them might involve a separate company