Broadband that bundles you out
The miracle of broadband has been exercising you painfully. Much of my postbag has been occupied with Wanadoo, which, in attempting to do its customers a favour with a little local loop unbundling (stowing its own kit in BT exchanges), actually bundled a good many of them out of cyberspace. Dozens of telecoms companies are now grappling for customers' money but a catch to watch out for is your cancellation rights, usually in the faded grey print at the end of the contract. Wanadoo customers, for instance, found themselves unable to defect even though they could not get online because the company would not release them.
If you do try to sweet-talk a rival, your current service provider can "forget" to hand over your migration authorisation code (Mac), without which you are captive.
Perhaps the most cunning ploy to keep income flowing was invented by Homecall, part of the Pipex Group. Three months after Edit Zolnai and Ben Lucas of Pinner had signed up to a joint broadband and unlimited telephone calls package, they were still not online. Their phone charges had been bungled, their address mistyped and much of their paperwork lost. So they wrote to cancel their contract. A customer services being responded, acknowledging that they were within the cooling-off period and could therefore withdraw without penalty. However, said being could not quite believe that the couple wanted to depart into the wilderness and asked them to email again assuring him that they had meant what they said. Several days elapsed before Lucas could respond because there was no internet service at home and he had to wait until he was next at work. By then, it was too late. In this brief interim, Homecall scrambled to do what they had failed to for three months and activated the couple's broadband service, which meant that they could no longer cancel. Zonai and Lucas only found this out when, weeks later, their new provider told them that they were locked into a relationship with the old enemy. Homecall blames everyone except itself. It declares that the couple's Mac code expired as they were trying to escape to a new provider and insists that it warned them that this would happen. And it blames the new provider for incorrectly processing the new account. It does not, however, find it odd that written requests for cancellation are not taken at face value. However, it has refunded the package fees and call charges paid by the couple, who now have a new Mac code.
Blame the laws of physics, says BT
Londoner Sara Norman and Richard Price of Brockenhurst, Hampshire, would not mind the chance to experience such hitches. Their gripe is that they can't get broadband at all. Norman was told that the impediment is a fibre-optic line that cannot carry the service nor be replaced because BT deems the task too expensive. For some reason, Norman is not permitted to slip them the money for the job. Price's line is aluminium and broadband will apparently only tolerate copper. If it is any comfort, there are thousands of others in the same predicament. As the telecoms watchdog Ofcom explains, BT, which provides the infrastructure, is under no legal obligation to ensure broadband for anybody. Nonetheless, out of the goodness of its heart, it set itself a voluntary target to connect up to 99.6% of the population and has, apparently, achieved this. Eventually, it hopes to give access to everyone but is hampered, it says, by the laws of physics. "Some customers' lines are too long for broadband to work, in some areas the cable technology does not support it and line-sharing equipment called Dacs prevents access," says a BT spokesman (Dacs, he discovers, is Norman's difficulty, not a fibre-optic line). "We are working to find solutions to all these problems."
