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[Bowdon]

ISP Zen Internet “Happy” to Offer Automatic Compensation for Faults

Many broadband ISPs are concerned about the plan to give UK residential and small business consumers an automatic right to compensation when their service fails, but not all. The Regulatory Manager of Zen Internet, Gary Hough, has said that they’re “broadly supportive” of the proposals.

The change, which was first proposed earlier this year as part of Ofcom’s Strategic Review and is now being added into law via the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill 2016-17, has received somewhat of a bumpy reception from ISPs.

At issue is the question of what faults should be deemed to attract compensation (Ofcom vaguely references “a loss or reduction in service“), whether the responsible core network suppliers (e.g. Openreach) should shoulder some of the burden and the potential for all subscribers to be hit with higher prices in order to compensate for the new “compensation” system.

[Weaver]

Sounds horrible. I don't want compensation, I want both high availability, and bounded and honest fix-times. This is just going to push my costs up, and push them up three times more than everyone else because it will be per-line. This ought to be something that wholesale carriers offer to ISPs. It should be up to end-users whether or not they want some kind of compensation deal with their ISPs. OfCom seem to be just meddling in a wrong-headed way. Perhaps they're making work for themselves to justify their continued existence.

[kitz]

Read the wording "happy to offer automatic compensation to customers when the fault is ours".

Looks good on paper, but in reality most all of the faults Ive had are related to the physical line, rather than ISP.

Zen is probably in a better position to offer this service.   1). They are less likely to have numpty customers.  2) Better troubleshooting before passing it on to Openreach.