Ofcom compensation scheme

iniltous

Its not really a difficult concept to grasp , you as a consumer pay a provider for a service , that provider has an arrangement with Openreach to use OR network to get the ‘service’ , broadband, phone,  or both , to your property.
If your service fails , then you may be entitled to compensation from the company you have a contractual relationship with , that is not Openreach, the service providers terms of compensation are set by OFCOM , ( those that are members of this compensation scheme) but membership of the scheme is voluntary.

It doesn’t matter if a fault that Openreach are responsible for fixing  affects 1 customer or 1 hundred consumers, these consumers are the service providers customers, not Openreach’s, provided these customers reported the outage to their provider , any compensation due will be paid by the service provider.

Openreach also have an automatic compensation scheme with service providers ( not consumers)  OR pay for network outages to the various service providers that were affected by the outage , again within the terms of the SLA ( service level agreement ) between Openreach and the particular service provider, effectively the network outage compensation costs are indirectly covered by OR anyway , but as compensation is generally in the form of a bill credit , obviously OR cannot provide a bill credit on another company’s customer account, one reason ( not the only one ) why the scheme was designed by OFCOM the way it is.

If you have a neighbour, affected by the same outage , but they didn’t report the outage to their individual provider , that’s unfortunate, but ultimately it’s no one’s fault but their own , it certainly cannot be  BT fault ( you state they are not a BT customer either on this post or on the post on the BT Consumer forum but wanted BT to compensate them  ) and Openreach will be compensating the service providers affected.
Your neighbour who unfortunately didn’t have the foresight to report the fault themselves have no automatic right to compensation , a compensation claim cannot be processed in the normal way, as they have no evidence that they were ever affected, they obviously could ask their provider of some sort of good will gesture, but their provider will have no way to know if they genuinely had a problem or are simply trying it on, OR won’t be ruling on if the request for goodwill is valid or not.

Its idiotic to expect OR to compensate both the service provider and the consumer, if you don’t like the way the regulator has set up this compensation scheme , join a service provider that isn’t a part of it , that way you would get nothing automatically  , but would have the ‘right’ to negotiate what you consider to be fair recompense, obviously, they would also have the right to tell you to get lost.

sevenhills

Grandad2b said:

sevenhills said:

I reported a fault with my broadband to my provider, One.
I went via the ombudsman and got adequate compensation, no problems.
Openreach is not a broadband provider.

Glad to hear that. Why did you have to go to the ombudsman?

I changed BB supplier, to OneStream, I was without BB for a couple of weeks and OneStream were not answering emails or chat. I was without BB for around a month and got a little over £100 compo.
They were not part of the official compensation scheme, so I had to use the ombudsman.