Leaving O2

tobybo

In February, I joined up with O2 home broadband, the service was great and had no complaints about it especially considering I am paying less than £8 a month.
My problem is that I have since moved house and the area I live in O2 cannot provide me with the same service, to have braodband from them will cost me £17.
I am therefore looking to terminate early and they want to slap a termination fee of the rest of my contract on me.
Can they do that? Surely they are obliged to provide me with the same service I have signed for and I really don't understand how they can charge over double the price.

macman

This is because you were on an exchange where O2 were an LLU provider. Now you're not, so they're offering you the O2 Access service, which is more expensive. O2 Access is just a resold BT Wholesale product, so the price is much higher, because they're paying BT more for the provision. They agreed to supply you at £7.34 at your original address, not at the the new address.
I assume you are getting the O2 mobile discount on both rates going by the rates you've quoted.

sporedude

Yep O2 are correct, You have to pay the price for cancelling the contract.

mk-donald

I would go through the T&Cs very carefully - hopefully you kept a copy of them AT THE TIME YOU SIGNED UP (they may have changed since!). Prima facie I'd think that o2 are acting fairly and in accordance with the T&Cs - it's YOU that is seeking to change the location of service and certainly NOW I think you'll find the T&C's explicitly cater for what you've found ie different prices between LLU & non-LLUd phonelines.

IF however you think the T&Cs don't cover it and/or you think they are UNFAIR then you will have a case to have that unfairness set aside. Initially I think you could argue that o2 could REDUCE the Access charge - they have definitely done that for some people who are STILL on Access despite their exchange having been LLU'd.

If that fails and you are still upset then you COULD make a formal complaint following their formal complaints procedure and if still unhappy you could push it through to arbitration, but if o2 are in the wrong I'd have expected them to have admitted it by then.

As you're only talking about 7m at £7.xx ie c£50 it may just be simplest to put it all behind you and pay HOWEVER first checkout if/how you could get an equivalent service at your new place for less than o2 are asking (for another 7m).

macman

This issue aboout continuance of contract terms at a new address comes up all the time on this board. Mainly with Virgin, whereby people seem to expect that if they move from a cable to a non-cabled area, VM are happily going to come along and supply cable to their new address, even if they've moved to somewhere miles away. Instead they get charged a termination fee if they are still in contract.
I don't see that the situation with LLU/non LLU on an ADSL line is really any diffferent, and would be amazed if any ISP's T&C's did not take account of this.