Timico - being charged £66 to leave on top of huge excess usage charges

Johnmcl7

I was originally with ADSL24 who then were changed to Coms and finally Timico who I'm currently with and believe I'm on the Talk Talk business network while the phone is still with BT. Last year they changed the billing from uncapped off peak to an always metered system so I put an order in for Fibre with another ISP which for a number of reasons hasn't happened (all down to BT)

Last month the bill was £52 instead of £18 which turned out was because I went 10GB over the 200GB limit and there was no warning at all. I've requested the contract to Timico to be cancelled giving them 30 day notice expecting to pay £18 for the month's line rental but they're charging a whopping £40 plus vat to leave them as per their terms and conditions because we didn't leave before the 1st January hence have accepted these punishing terms and conditions. I've been with the succession of companies up to this point for several years.

It says this charge is to leave their service rather than to cease the line entirely although I will clarify this with them. I'm extremely annoyed with myself for all this so I thought I should look into whether this is all legal or there's any basis to take it to Ofcom. I'm assuming it's the former but I thought as may as well check to make sure.

John

kwikbreaks

Ofcom doesn't deal with individual disputes with ISPs.

http://consumers.ofcom.org.uk/complain/phone-and-broadband-complaints/billing/

Ofcom works to ensure everyone gets the very best from their communications.

Our role is to look at how issues affect UK consumers as a whole.

We cannot handle individual complaints.

The page does go on to offer advice on how to proceed though.

Johnmcl7

Thanks for the information, that's a good start as I'll fill in their monitoring survey. I doubt it will come to anything but no harm in doing so.

John

Timico

Hi John, I'm sorry you've had a bad experience with us. We wrote to all ex-Coms customers explaining the changes in broadband pricing last year. You can see this also on our blog: (Unfortunately we cannot post links on this forum because we are a new member - Please search 'Coms welcome' on our blog or on google)

All our customers can track their daily and monthly broadband usage on MyTimico, which also issues email usage alerts but I understand you had not registered for MyTimico. We publish all our charges on our website and link to them in our customer agreements. We certainly don't aim to hide anything or trick anyone: See our Terms/Policy page which can be found on the footer our our website, visible on every page (again sorry can't post link).

The £40 is for where customers explicitly tell us they are terminating a line which reflects the costs we're charged by BT Wholesale. Very few customers cancel their lines as they are usually migrating to another service provider which doesn't incur the £40 charge. We'll email you with more details rather than share confidential information here. As a goodwill gesture we'll refund this charge and your broadband usage charges.