Can you cancel a broadband contract early?

Anamox

Hi,
I am being told I cannot terminate my broadband contract even though it was requested within what I thought was a 14 day cooling off period as required under distance selling regulations. The dispute is ongoing but they're not saying anything other than "you can cancel for the remaining cost of services" which is extortionate considering the service is 10% the speed it should be. The timeline is follows, would you agree that the 14 day cooling off period applies?

• 13/12/2019: broadband ordered online
• 16/12/2019: broadband company told me it would take 14 days before services begins
• 18/12/2019: confirmed my service will start on 06/01/2020
• 08/01/2020: told the company I wish to cancel the contract as speed far too slow and customer service poor, I knew their response would be woefully slow so I specifically mentioned I didn't want them to wait 14 days and then tell me sorry you can't cancel because you're out of the cooling off period
• - weeks and weeks of them trying to tell me they're fixing it (they haven't, but they charged me £192 for the fix they didn't achieve...) and not being able to contact customer service-

• 13/03/2020: you cannot cancel the contract as your 14 day cooling off period started on 13/12/2019, if you do cancel it will cost you the entire remainder of payments

I am left with unusable internet and apparently I can't cancel it. By what they say none of their customers will be able to experience the speed of the internet before they're out of the 14 day cooling off period as there is a standard 14 day wait before service commences. It almost seems like they've put customers in an impossible to get out of situation... Citizens Advice Bureau makes it sound as if I have a right to have the contract cancelled but I'm literally up against the company who send a standard response and cannot get a human to do anything other than read off a script. I've sent lengthy complaints to no avail. 

Thanks for any advice offered!

JJ_Egan

10 days for the line to adjust itself is true thats how the exchange works . .What was your estimated speed on your join up email ??

Charge for a fix is only when its the customers fault .

SLOW  over what ethernet or wifi ??

iniltous

If you are talking about a service delivered over Openreach, then you are given an estimate of the speed you should get, if you don’t get that, the ISP has to be given an opportunity to get you up to the speed they said you would get , if they cannot do this, you can leave penalty free, so the 10 day training period and 14 day are irrelevant, but there is no point complaining in day 1 to 10, because the speeds here are not necessarily an indicator of the stable speed the line will deliver.
if you bought a product that said ‘average’ speed 63Mb, but your individual estimate was 25Mb, then the figure they have to provide is 25 not 63

Anamox

JJ_Egan said:

10 days for the line to adjust itself is true thats how the exchange works . .What was your estimated speed on your join up email ??

Charge for a fix is only when its the customers fault .

SLOW  over what ethernet or wifi ??

Charge came when they sent an engineer to my property without me knowing what they required and I was out - they knew this would be the case.

Charge came when they sent an engineer to my property without me knowing what they required and I was out - they knew this would be the case. They're now saying I gave them full permission and told them I'd be there to let the engineer in - which is 100% wrong.

I have no estimated speed from sign up, I've done a dummy run through the website again as if I was a new customer and there isn't one. Only the average speed, which should be 11MB/s - I get approx 1MB/s by WIFI and I've had UP TO 3MB/s by ethernet but average has been 1MB/s or 1.5MB/s over 8 weeks of testing regularly.

iniltous said:

If you are talking about a service delivered over Openreach, then you are given an estimate of the speed you should get, if you don’t get that, the ISP has to be given an opportunity to get you up to the speed they said you would get , if they cannot do this, you can leave penalty free, so the 10 day training period and 14 day are irrelevant, but there is no point complaining in day 1 to 10, because the speeds here are not necessarily an indicator of the stable speed the line will deliver.
if you bought a product that said ‘average’ speed 63Mb, but your individual estimate was 25Mb, then the figure they have to provide is 25 not 63

It is delivered over Openreach via POP Telecom but no estimate was given, nor can I find one on the website. I can only find speeds for fibre which I don't have. 

The only figure I have is the average speed of 11MB/s, I receive approximately 10% that speed and have been for 9 weeks odd!

Thanks both for your replies.

JJ_Egan

No guarantee of any speed over wifi .

POP Telecom big long running thread on the forum .

See your other POP post .