I know I’m going to get flamed about this idea. Please be kind. It’s only for discussion. What do you think? Good idea? ISPs have to give you a fraction of your bill back? And also maybe even multiply that by some
k for the inconvenience, and for the cost of having to have redundancy (eg extra lines or 4G) to compensate for the unreliability.
Say your line is down 3 days, as mine is right now, that should be ( ( 3 * 12 / 365 ) *
k *
my_monthly_bill ) refunded. Suggestions as to what
k might be?
To be fair to ISPs, Openreach and other carriers should all be required to pay the same kind of thing back to ISPs where it’s OR etc at fault not the ISP. I’d suggest however that in this case the repayment is (carrier’s monthly charge to CP *
x ) where
x = 2.0 say. The x here should be high so as to incentivise OR etc to really fix the network properly long-term not just patch it up so it keeps on failing again and again. A harsher suggestion would be to increase
x by so much (tbs) for every additional fault on a given line within some time period, say one year. (What, a
sliding window of one year? Rather than jan to jan? So look back 12 months from the time of each new fault. Would that make sense?) It would also push OR etc to get rid of copper. And a high
x here would repay ISPs for having to deal with the fault caused by OR’s network and the cost of end-user tech support.
Self-interest clause, shamelessly: We need a mechanism for making sure that those users stuck with the worst lines do not find that CPs (or OR) do not simply refuse to take on customers because their lines look dodgy. These are already the most disadvantaged customers and are stuck with what they’ve got and don’t need to be disadvantaged further. Ofcom needs to make it a requirement of ISPs not to indulge in such discrimination without an overwhelming reason why they can’t take ‘difficult’ users on, such as ISPs: that only have limited geographic coverage, or only do one type of technology eg FTTP only, or who require that your area has so-and-so kit in the exchange; technological and practical reasons only, not financial ones.
I ask myself why am I paying AA for 3 days service on a line that isn’t working? It’s not an answer to say that it’s not AA’s fault on this occasion. Indeed it’s Openreach’s fault but I need to be recompensed regardless so this is why BT needs to pay AA. If you want to be ridiculously harsh you could say it’s still AA’s fault because they haven’t forced OR to permanently improve the reliability of the links long-term. But that’s nonsense because AA doesn’t have the clout to do that, not without some kind of new ‘remediation order’ deal from OfCom, where a CP could say to BT etc “this line or exchange or whatever component is crap, replace or upgrade it to make it good
long term”.
Last month I had no internet via DSL at all for over a week in part due to AA’s fault so that should have been =( ~ £30 * some
x ) refund in total over all lines (arithmetic is probably wrong). They wouldn’t like that much, having to pay that out, but charging money while not providing a service is not good.
With the high value of x=2.0 for example, for compensation payments from Openreach, carriers et al. to CPs, the idea then is that CPs should typically end up making a modest profit on an OR et al. carrier fault and this
x needs to be high enough to ensure this. That would also discourage ISPs from discrimination against the customers with the worst lines. Perhaps such payments should be (
a0 +
carrier_monthly_charge_to_CP *
x ) instead, where
a0 is some fixed number to represent the cost to CPs of providing customer tech support. The value should probably be modest but I have no idea what it should be. I don’t know about the variable
carrier_monthly_charge_to_CP, what its value might be. More likely it needs another fixed multiplier
y to be in there too to rescale the value of
carrier_monthly_charge_to_CP.