BT broadband: family pulls plug after two months without service
After waiting and waiting to be connected, one family had enough and jumped ship – but BT insists they honour their contract
Driven mad: Openreach delays are closing the internet off to many customers. Photograph: Rod Kirkpatrick/VisualMedia
When a Hertfordshire family was left without broadband for two months they finally decided enough was enough and cancelled their BT contract. Now the telecoms giant has threatened them with debt collectors.
Despite suffering a catalogue of errors that first left them without the advertised internet service over many months, and then cut them off completely for seven weeks, BT has sent repeated demands that they must pay almost £500 in contract charges and late payment fees.
Consultant Kevin Judges, who lives in Letchworth with his wife and teenage children, says that when the sixth engineer failed to reconnect them to BT he decided to contact Virgin to install a phone and broadband service, which happened faultlessly within a few days.
Judges wrote to BT cancelling the household's contract, stating that he felt he had given the firm a reasonable chance to fix it. But BT has insisted Judges must continue to pay for the phone and broadband service.
Judges is not alone in having problems with BT's superfast Infinity service. A look at the Infinity thread on BT's online forum shows it has plenty of unhappy customers, with falling speeds a particular complaint.
BT Openreach is the separate company with responsibility for the overall network on behalf of most phone companies – although Virgin, with its own cable network, is not reliant on it – and it seems it is experiencing connection delays of up to six months.
The Judges' problems go back to September 2012 when he complained that the broadband speed he was receiving was closer to 1-4Mb rather than the 37Mb service he had been promised
"It would freeze all the time when watching iPlayer on a laptop. An engineer was sent to investigate, but rather than improving matters he made them much worse and we were left with no broadband at all.
"This situation continued for nearly eight weeks with many calls to the BT call centre and multiple visits from engineers who were unable to fix the problem. You don't know how inconvenient it is to be without internet access until it is taken away for so long. When the sixth engineer failed to fix it, I decided enough was enough and called in Virgin," he says.
BT offered the couple a £43 refund for the lost service period, but has refused to allow them to leave.
Judges took his case to the Ombudsman Service for the telecoms industry, but it found in BT's favour after concluding the company had acted in good faith.
The ombudsman added it would not take into account the Sale of Goods Act that says goods and services must be fit for purpose and as described. BT is now insisting the couple pay for the service it failed to provide.
Ian Cummins from Romford is also trying to extract himself from a BT contract after suffering poor service. He has spent the past month trying to fix his internet connection. One engineer turned up at his house but couldn't fix it. This week, Cummins says, he spent two hours on the phone to the company to no avail.
"When I tried to cancel I was told there was nothing I could do except pay the £184 – still for no service. It's just so frustrating and time-consuming trying to get it sorted out," he says.
David Foster, a partner and head of litigation at the Surrey-based law firm Barlow Robbins, says that while the law is very much on the side of consumers like Judges, making big firms deal with the issues reasonably can be difficult.
"I have handled many cases against BT over the years and it is a seriously dysfunctional company to deal with when conflicts like this arise. It has a reputation for fighting the matter up until the last minute and then giving in just before they are due in court.
"Generally, if a company is failing to provide a service and you have given it a reasonable chance to remedy the problem, the contract is deemed invalid," he says.
Money asked BT at what point, if it has failed to provide a service, it will let its customers out of a contract – but we are still waiting.
Instead, a spokesman says: "We are always disappointed when we cannot come to an agreement with a customer, but we do follow the Ofcom-prescribed process carefully to ensure that customers can refer the matter to Ombudsman Services: Communications. We always abide by the ombudsman's conclusions in full. On this occasion the ombudsman agreed with BT's position on the matter."
Meanwhile, Judges says he has no intention of paying for a service he has not received and will happily let the matter go to court. "The debt collectors have gone away after we told them the debt is disputed. We've been treated disgracefully," he says.
• In the past few weeks we have been receiving many complaints about BT and have been sending them on to Warren Buckley, head of BT customer services. His office is now looking into them and we will report back when he responds.
An ombudsman in the spotlight
Unplugged: internet and telephone disputes dealt with by the ombudsman rarely favour the consumers. Photograph: Alamy
The Kevin Judges case shines a renewed spotlight on the Ombudsman Services: Communications, which critics say is so limited in its remit that phone companies are let off the hook.
The service exists to arbitrate in disputes between consumers and telecoms (and other) firms, and the telecoms regulator, Ofcom, puts great store by it. However, the OSC's own figures show how few consumers get a satisfactory outcome.
To take your complaint to the OSC – which is a not-for-profit limited company, not a government agency – you have to have been in dispute with your provider for at least eight weeks. It is happy to deal with relatively simple problems, but tells customers it does not rule on complicated contractual matters.
The OSC covers 433 telecoms companies. Its recently published annual report shows that it immediately dismissed 80% of the 70,000 consumers contacting it last year with a telecoms complaint, as their problems were deemed "outside its terms of reference". In most cases the consumer had not waited the required eight weeks.
The OSC says it took up 10,331 telecoms problems, and made a financial or non-financial award in 51% of cases. Unusually, it does not publish the number of cases in which it found in the consumer's favour, although it says it soon plans to.
In the past, Guardian Money has featured several cases of mobile users who had their phones stolen and the thief racked up huge bills, in some cases up to £9,000. Encouraged by the telecoms firms, victims took their complaints to the OSC hoping to get a fair hearing, only to find that it sided with the mobile provider and said the victim was liable for the calls made.
Eventually it emerged that the OSC has no scope to rule on whether the mobile company was offering an unfair contract or had failed in its duty of care – rendering complaining to it following a theft a waste of time.
In its letters to Judges' MP, to whom he had complained about his BT problem, the OSC defended its decision saying: "It was not within our remit to conclude that the law required BT to cancel the contract without penalty. This is a matter for the courts."
However, in a statement to Money this week it said. "It is not correct to state that the OSC does not rule on contractual matters. If the service provider has not provided a service, and we felt that it was justified, we would – and have in other cases – make a requirement that the complainant should be released from that contract without penalty. We provide a service that is fair and reasonable. Final decisions are not legally binding and complainants can take the matter to a court if they are not satisfied with the decision."
The OS as a whole employs 177 staff. Last year it had an £8m turnover and handled fewer than 20,000 complaints. Its chief ombudsman, Lewis Shand Smith, received a combined salary and pension contribution of £144,000.
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