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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To think the broadband company should pay for the data I've had to buy?

4 replies

HollopingHooligans · 22/12/2024 15:26

Because of their absolute fucking incompetence??

We live quite remotely and are served by a phone line that comes about 1km through fields to just our house, like a spur. We have 2 separate internet connections/landlines, one for our house and a business one that's for an outbuilding. They're both under the same account number with the same broadband provider.

Both went down last Monday. Rang to report it, gave both numbers, explained both were down. An engineer came out on Wednesday and said it was a big repair job and that a team would be out to completely replace the cable where it was damaged by trees. This happened on Thursday but late that afternoon when the engineers came to test that the repair had worked, it turned out that a fault had only been raised on the business line even though I'd specifically reported that both lines were down. They refused to test or reconnect the house line because it hadn't been raised as a fault so they were allowed. So I had to spend over an hour on the phone again raising a separate fault for the house line.

I've now had a text saying Openreach can't come back to reconnect our house line to the brand new cable until fucking Friday 27th. If it had been raised as a fault when I rang to report it, it would have been done days ago!

I've had to buy separate one off data bundles for 2 of the kids phones (20GB each) and a data bundle for my mobile dongle (100GB) - the mobile signal is quite poor here so you can't really hotspot from a phone, it crawls to an unusable halt if more than one device is using the same mobile data connection. I've now spent £80 on data FFS which I could have done without, but the kids have school/college work to do and we want to be able to watch TV so there wasn't really much choice!

Please don't come and tell me it's possible to get cheaper data etc - the kids don't have fancy dual SIM phones so it had to be added to their current contract SIMs and there's only one network that really works at all here so we can't just shop around for the cheapest! I'm just cross. And want to know if it's reasonable to send the receipts to the broadband company and ask them to cover the costs, seeing as it's their incompetence that's left us with no internet or landline!

OP posts:
BigSleepySnail · 22/12/2024 19:37

You can get compensation for each day you're offline, once you reach a certain point without service - it happened to me recently. It was a set amount per day, but it covered what I spent on data. I also made a complaint and got extra compensation, but it took many phone calls.

www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/service-quality/automatic-compensation-need-know/

The other thing that helped was to buy a mobile hotspot for the house in a contract, but cancel within the 14 day cooling off period - it was much cheaper than mobile data. E.g. below.

https://www.vodafone.co.uk/mobile-broadband-deals

But yes, the whole thing is super frustrating and annoying. They should ship a complementarity mobile hotspot for free via courier, but don't!

HollopingHooligans · 22/12/2024 19:40

BigSleepySnail · 22/12/2024 19:37

You can get compensation for each day you're offline, once you reach a certain point without service - it happened to me recently. It was a set amount per day, but it covered what I spent on data. I also made a complaint and got extra compensation, but it took many phone calls.

www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/service-quality/automatic-compensation-need-know/

The other thing that helped was to buy a mobile hotspot for the house in a contract, but cancel within the 14 day cooling off period - it was much cheaper than mobile data. E.g. below.

https://www.vodafone.co.uk/mobile-broadband-deals

But yes, the whole thing is super frustrating and annoying. They should ship a complementarity mobile hotspot for free via courier, but don't!

Thanks, this is great info! Unfortunately I don't think it will make sense to order in a proper hotspot as it won't arrive before they come and fix it now due to Christmas. Just so frustrating.

OP posts:
Aaron95 · 22/12/2024 19:43

The answer lies in the Terms and Conditions of your contract. What does it say in the SLA?

If a working internet connection is important to you then you can use a provider which will guarantee to repair in a faster timescale but it will cost you a lot more money.

Makingchocolatecake · 22/12/2024 21:10

You should be able to get a fixed amount of money back. I once got some back for my wi fi being down (I didn't know then it was because I'd cut through the phone line thinking it was a loose old cable, but ofc I didn't ring them back to tell them) 😄

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