HDTV/3D TV News
Around three million fixed line broadband and phone related complaints were unresolved by internet service providers last year and yet only 25 per cent of consumer took the matter further.
It seems that despite there being information around, the consumer does not know where to go to take a complaint further.
However, Ofcom is looking to make the process clearer, so now it would seem that the ISP will have to write to the customer who made the compliant within eight weeks, informing them of their rights and where to go next in order to get it resolved.
This is a step in the right direction, but eight weeks after a complaint was first received, then more time after before the consumer gets an issue resolved, seems a long time.
As an alternative to sitting on complaints, you could, if you were an ISP of sufficiently low integrity, establish a forum where technical matters could be discussed then start deleting posts which were critical of certain aspects of your service and closing the accounts of forum members making those posts, whilst making a lot of noise about how necessary it was to be open and transparent.
Of course, there’s no ISP that does anything like that*, so it’s all OK.
*Except for ones like BT
Yes 8 weeks is a long time to wait for a reply from an ISP, but this does not surprise me. Of all the serves supplied to households such as electricity, water, telephone, internet, etc. The internet service has to be by far the worst. Despite this more and more services are being switched from the postal method to the internet meaning if you are not on line then you get a poor service.
I don’t have to pay a monthly fee to receive post, so if the government are going to make it necessary to have the internet to communicate with them then they should offer free internet access to all.